Colin Phillips (Alumni)
I was recently working on a customer SharePoint site when I was running into this issue with trying to import new data into their environment.
Import-SPWeb : Could not find language 1040
It was truly very frustrating as I had already installed what I thought was the correct language pack. Actually I had made a few mistakes, but we’ll get there. 🙂
I thought this link may help, but it didn’t exactly point me in the right direction.
Unfortunately, I had totally forgotten that when downloading language packs, although you’d think you could download other language packs from the MS website in your native language, that’s not actually the case – you have to download other language packs in the website language of the language you’re looking for. In other words, I had downloaded the English language pack, because the language of the website for downloading language packs was in English and I thought (for some bizarre reason, even though I knew this wasn’t true) that the English download had all of the other languages packaged together in it – I don’t know why I thought this, I’ve done this exact thing before successfully the correct way.
When trying to download the Italian language pack, this is wrong:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=42082
Note above that the URL includes “en-us” and the website reads in English – wrong! The English download only includes the English language pack.
This is how the website should appear when trying to download the Italian language pack:
https://www.microsoft.com/it-IT/download/details.aspx?id=42082
Note above that the URL includes “it-it” (for Italian) and the website reads in Italian.
Be sure to following the instructions under “Install Instructions” (also be sure to install this on each of the SharePoint servers in the farm) and I highly recommend you reboot your SharePoint servers after installing a language pack.
After I had finally got that installed correctly, I was still unable to load the data correctly as the website language was not in Italian. Unfortunately there’s no way to correct this using the UI, but I was able to use this post from John White of UnlimitedViz) to allow me to change my language so I could import (note: this is not a supported technique, but I was beyond worrying about that by this point).
The other issue I had after I had corrected the first few problems above was that the SharePoint 2013 environment I had installed the language pack into was SP1, but I had originally downloaded the SharePoint 2013 RTM language pack, not the SP1 language pack. As such, although I could now get past the issues above, I was still not able to successfully see any of the contents of the SharePoint sites in the native language (Italian). Again, another brain fart on my part – this is a warning, don’t try to SharePoint after taking 2 weeks off over the holidays. After I downloaded and installed the SP1 language pack, all was right with the world again.