Because it took me freaking forever to find instructions on how to do this… You do NOT need a message-resource tag in your struts configuration files. Those are outdated instructions for old versions of Struts.You do not need to edit ANY xml at all. Your Action needs to implement Freemarker’s TemplateMethodModel interface You need a package.properties file (the default locale) and a then another one for each other locale / language you want to support (ex.