Languages

Seventeen languages, what is translated, what deliberately is not, and the difference between a label and a record.

The console is offered in seventeen languages. The language is chosen per person and remembered; a deployment sets the default, so a Saudi entity opens in Arabic on a laptop configured in English.

Seventeen is a long list to pick from when you use two. Under Personalize → Languages, tick only the ones you use; English and the language you are reading now always stay in the picker. An administrator can set which languages the picker offers by default for the whole company — see Your preferences → Only the languages you use.

What is translated

• The interface: module names, section headings, screen names, column headings, field labels, buttons, messages and hints.
• This documentation and the training site, in the same seventeen languages.
• Arabic and Urdu flip the whole document to right-to-left, including the navigation, the tables and the forms.

A language recorded on a record

Where a record holds a language — a patient’s, a candidate’s, a contact’s preferred language — it is shown by its name, "Kannada", not by its code "kn". That holds on lists, on the record, in reports and in filter values. On a form, a language field is a pick-list of names, so nobody has to know the code.

What is not, and why

• Numerals stay Western. Arabic-Indic digits are correct Arabic and wrong here: Saudi accounting, banking and regulatory filings all use 0–9, and a ledger rendering totals in a different digit set cannot be reconciled against a bank statement that does not.
• Your records are not machine-translated. A customer named in Arabic is stored in Arabic — as data, in a column of its own — and shown as it was entered. A translated label over an untranslated record is a console that still reads in English, so the record carries its own local text rather than passing through a translator.
• Printed forms are Latin-script. Fonts are not embedded in the generated PDF, so a form laid out in a non-Latin script will not render correctly.