CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I've heard that although CiviCRM has been translated into many languages, it is designed as a single language per instance.  Can anyone confirm or correct this rumor?  This is now the biggest single issue for my organization.  We definitely need multiple language support in a single instance.  Is this something that could be added with reasonable effort?  Or is it an architectural issue?  Thanks in advance for any response.

Thanks, Dave.

Dave Greenberg has moved this topic from "pre-installation" to here and referred me to Piotr Szotowski as project lead for the multi-language capability of CiviCRM. He advised me to post our needs and timeframe in some detail.

My organization is interested in CiviCRM. Donations and Events would be the primary initial applications, but we see CiviCRM as the foundation of a holistic person-centered approach to many facets of our constituent relations. CiviCRM is a good functional fit with our vision. We have several key concerns about its capabilities, but we are focused now on the multi-language issue.

We have a global constituency of many thousands of people. Our global web presence is Joomla-based, and our multi-language engine is Joom!Fish. Currently donations through our web site are individual orders, and events are supported via Regonline, also on an individual order basis. Neither subsystem is a CRM with persistent identity. We want to evolve to "MyXXX" where a Joomla identity is persistent and personal data can be entered once and available to pre-populate forms for donations, events, and other forms of participation. And we want a backend 360 view of constituent interests, participation, and support. In other words, we want CiviCRM.

Multi-language via the Joom!Fish engine is an absolute requirement. In one instance of CiviCRM, entities such as forms need to exist in multiple versions along a language axis, and need to display automatically in the appropriate language based on the Joomla user profile language setting.  We would consider both volunteer participation and financial contributions to support the CiviCRM internationalization effort, if it will be compatible with our needs.  I will be happy to pursue this conversation in greater detail, perhaps off the public forum, and to involve others more familiar than I with the technical details.

Regarding timeframe, our unified global web presence launched this month, and "MyXXX" is one of our phase two objectives. We would like to achieve it as soon as possible, but we are reasonably OK with status quo and can take some time to do this in a careful, scalable way, with a sound architecture that will hopefully hold up for some years.