Reinstall site collections after language pack installation

Question

I have two site collections, with a bunch of sites under them. Now I have been asked to change the language of the site.

I have successfully installed the language pack, and completed all the tasks related to it.

Now I want to change the language on the existing site. I have found infomation saying that I cant do this on already installed sites and site collections, since their template is set to the original language.

I wonder, is it any possibility to keep the content of the existing sites, and only install the templates again?

Answer 1

No, there is no supported way to change the Site Collection Default Language once it is created.

• So you can delete the exisiting site collection and recreate the site collection with correct language, but this way you will lose all content.
• other way, you can create another Site collection with new language and then manually copy the data from old site to new.
• Another way, just change the User language settings, see if that solves the problem.

Note: Use on your own risk.

• Another method is to directly update the template languge in SQL server. this is totally unsupported by MSFT. But what I am thinking, Copy the Site collection and restore in the test farm and change the language using SQL query. To test it.

How to Change the Language for a SharePoint Site