CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi - hoping some of those who have more experience in this area can make some recommendations.
This global organisations has Orgs as members - some of these members have up to 3 language versions of their name eg African with French and English variations. Most of them have an English variation but not all. Certainly more have English than French.
Our goal is to have the 'primary' name be the indigenous version, but also to show the English variation in most circumstances -and have both of them included in searches - and push them through in to Views listings.
There are three options for names as I see
- translations
- Nickname
- Legal Name

My thinking is Nickname would be a good way of having the English variation used - and then tweak things so the Nickname appears in brackets after the primary name on Summary Screen - and rejig all searches to always include Nickname (I recall discussions to do the above for Individual so assume similar approach - if it worked for individuals - could be used for Orgs).

While we will be working towards multilanguage on this site I am not leaning to doing this via translations as not sure how searching etc copes with that.

At this point, for the few Orgs that have Indigenous + French + English I was thinking of having both the French and English in Nickname just with a / to separate them - ie they would both be searchable via the above approach.

Nickname currently doesn't show on the Summary Screen for Orgs at all - not sure if that is intention or omission - it seems like a good option for putting in acronymns in other use cases.

Any comments on any of the above? How do people use the Nickname v Legal Name fields?

I would think that sometimes the Acronym would be in the Org Name field and the full name might need to go in the Nickname field - so perhaps it should just be called Alternate Name