You get a US English sign-in screen even though you specified a different locale

Akamai’s OpenID Connect Playground is an incredibly useful tool for testing, and for learning about, Hosted Login. However, sometimes the Playground can give you the wrong impression. For example, the OpenID Connect Playground provides you with a handy dropdown list that sets the value of the ui_locales parameter (used to determine the language that Hosted Login screens are displayed in):

With that in mind, people often set the UI locale to something other than English (e.g., Welsh), click the Start button, and immediately see a sign-in screen displayed in … uh, English:

As the Welsh would say, “Nid dyna oedd i fod i ddigwydd” ("that’s not what was supposed to happen").

So what went wrong here? Nothing actually. As it turns out, Hosted Login is capable of displaying screens in many different languages; however, the only language that ships with the product is English. Straight out of the box, Hosted Login can’t display screens in Welsh because it doesn’t have a Welsh locale and it doesn’t have any Welsh translations. Because of that, Hosted Login defaults to displaying screens in English, the only language available to it.

Or, like we said, the only language available to it out of the box. If you want, however, you can provide your own translations and teach Hosted Login how to “speak” Welsh. For more information, see the article Localize screen text .

On a related note, some people might actually have a Welsh locale, but when they choose that locale they get a blank sign-on screen:

Considering the fact that Welsh is famous for having words like llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, you wouldn’t expect to see a completely blank screen here. And yet ….

The problem, as you might have guessed, is this: even though we have a Welsh locale, we don’t have any Welsh translations. If you look in the flow, all our Welsh translations are blank:

To actually get something to appear onscreen we need to add the Welsh translations. For example, here’s our sign-in screen after we added a single translation, the Welsh equivalent to the Welcome to Gizmo! title:

Again, see the article Localize screen text for more information.