Translating Your Own Content
The platform's own interface is one thing. Everything you have added — labels, help text, dropdown values, templates — is yours.
Where to find it
Architect Panel → Internationalisation:
- Languages — the configured languages
Architect Panel → Data:
- Datastores — field labels and help text
Architect Panel → Layout & Pages:
- E-mail Templates — templates needing a translated version
This is usually the larger half
The platform's strings are finite and translated once. Your labels, dropdown values, help text and templates grow with the application, and each addition is a translation somebody must do.
Organisations budget for the first and are surprised by the second.
The parts most often missed
- Dropdown values. A form with translated labels and English options is a common and jarring failure.
- Help text — the guidance sitting under a field, which is precisely what somebody struggling will read.
- Validation messages you wrote yourself.
- E-mail and letter templates, which need a version per language.
- Document templates.
Templates need a version per language
And a way to choose the right one when sending. That means knowing each recipient's language — a field on the person's record — and selecting accordingly.
Decide this early, because retrofitting a language preference onto an existing contact base means asking everybody or guessing.
Record the preference, do not infer it
Guessing from a name, an address or a browser setting gets it wrong often enough to offend. Ask, store the answer, and let people change it.
New fields need translating too
Every field added after launch arrives untranslated and appears in the wrong language until somebody notices. Make translation part of adding a field rather than a periodic clean-up — the clean-up never quite happens.
Keep terminology consistent
The same concept should use the same word throughout. Two translators, or one translator at different times, will produce two words for "case" — and a user reading both concludes they are different things.
Keep a short glossary of your key terms and their agreed translations.
Check what a real record looks like
Not an empty form. A completed record with real values, in the language, is where you see the untranslated dropdown value and the English status sitting among translated labels.
Worked example
An organisation translates its labels, help text and every dropdown value, and maintains Welsh versions of eleven templates selected by a language field on the contact record. A short glossary keeps its case-management vocabulary consistent, and adding a field now includes its Welsh label as a matter of course.
Recommendations
- Budget for your own content — it is the larger half.
- Do not forget dropdown values and help text.
- Record language preference, never infer it.
- Keep a glossary for consistent terminology.