CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi,

I'm from Quebec/Canada, and we have similar issues, although in only two languages.

I think the most common workaround right now is to create custom fields for each language. Ex: "Name [French], Name [Dutch]", and use the "core" name for English, for example.

There are a few issues with doing that:

- CiviCRM search and alphabetical sorting will be broken in French/Dutch
- If you create Views in Drupal, you will need a different "view display" for each language, so that it displays and sorts with the correct name.
- Administratively, the CiviCRM contact record will look weird, because the "name in english" will be at one place, and the name in other languages will be in another place. (This can make it hard to convince colleagues that, yes, CiviCRM is a great and professional solution).

At CiviCRM sprints and conferences, there have been discussions of making the "organisation name" field multi-lingual. When CiviCRM works as multi-lingual, some fields can have language-specific values. For example, the contribution page title. You can have one contribution page for all 3 languages, but the title (which is a form value) can be translated to other language.

The problem with making "organisation name" multi-lingual, is that people often forgot to update the translation when editing a form. Back in early versions of CiviCRM 3.x, it was possible, but we ended up disabling it. People would often edit a contact record, forget to click on the multi-lingual icon to edit the value, and edit only the organisation name in the current language. So sometimes they would end up with "ACME Corp" in English, and "Test" in French, because they initially named the contact record 'Test' and only corrected it in English.

I should also note that not only organisation name was multilingual in 3.x, but so was "first name", "last name" of individual contacts. That probably caused even more issues. And we do not intend to re-make it multi-lingual, since no one requested it (it was aimed at countries who have to deal with multiple alphabets, but it's rarely really needed).

Anyway, I don't know if that explanation makes sense, but it's a really simple usability problem that has big consequences.

We plan to force multi-lingual fields to be edited only using the multi-lingual icon (to popup translations in all languages). However, it's potentially a big change, and we're not really sure how to deal with areas such as "inline edit", webform and profiles.

Bref, as a short term solution, you may want to:

- create custom fields and hack around the issue,
- help us develop and test a better solution in core for a future version of CiviCRM,
- when ready, you will be able to copy your data using an SQL query, and remove your hacks,
- if possible, help fund the development by having your organisation become a partner (https://civicrm.org/providers/) or member (https://civicrm.org/membership) of civicrm (see also https://civicrm.org/participate).

There are a dozen items related to multi-lingual improvements that are slowly moving forward, but will greatly improve the usability of CiviCRM in multi-lingual environments. However, as free software developers, we either get our clients to fund it, or do it in our little free time, so any help is much appreciated.

Mathieu