SharePoint 2010 Error Changing Variation Label Display Name

I have setup a multilingual WCM site with 6 languages. I created the web application and then setup variations to test the language pack installation. It was a test site with English as my source language. I used the Display Name for each variation which was in written in English rather then using the native language. This is how my variations are setup

My client wanted these display name to be written in native language. I though it should be easy enough to fix this problem. I hovered on "cn" and clicked on edit. I saw that I could change the Display Name property, but could not change the language and Locale. Ok… I changed the display for the Chinese site to "中文" from "Chinese" and to my surprise this is the error I got

This seems to an error in the control/page. Well as this was a test site I had an option to recreate the variations from ground-up. But what if it were a production site or a development site with lot of customization in place won’t be easy task. Well I knew that this information has to stored somewhere and I could get to it using the API. I knew there existed the Relationship list, after poking around a bit and using my favorite tool SharePoint Manager I found that there is a hidden list which stores the declarations for variations. When I try to browse to that list in browser it did not seem to like it. So I decided to use PowerShell to access and change the data here and see if this gets reflected in the Variation Labels page in site settings. So following below is the PowerShell script which worked for me

$spWeb = Get-SPWeb "http://myweb.contoso.com"
$guid = [guid]$spWeb.AllProperties["_VarLabelsListId"]
$varList = $spWeb.Lists[$guid]
$varList.Items | % {
	$curListItem = $_
	switch($curListItem["Flag Control Display Name"]) {
		"Chinese"  { $curListItem["Flag Control Display Name"] = "中文" }
		"French" { $curListItem["Flag Control Display Name"] = "Français" }
		"German" { $curListItem["Flag Control Display Name"] = "Deutsch" }
		"Italian" { $curListItem["Flag Control Display Name"] = "Italiano" }
		"Portuguese" { $curListItem["Flag Control Display Name"] = "Português" }
		"Spanish" { $curListItem["Flag Control Display Name"] = "Español" }
	}
	$curListItem.Update()
}
$spWeb.Dispose()



After going back to site setting and Variation Labels I saw that the display name are updated.

Enjoy the power of PowerShell (Swiss knife….)