Multilingualism

In the post “Mojn!”, we announced that alfons should learn more languages. Time for an update.

The goal: alfons will speak at least German, English and Danish in future. Other languages should be easy to add later.

More interesting to us than translation alone is another question: what language do you work in, and what language do you speak to your customers? Those are often not the same. Someone based in Flensburg who works for a business in Sønderborg might want to see the interface in German but send invoices in Danish. So, in future, alfons will distinguish between two things: the interface language, which each person can set for themselves, and the language of documents, which is linked to the contact.

What does this mean for our users? Nothing to begin with. Your data will stay as it is. Behind the scenes, alfons will store things such as an invoice’s status in a language-neutral way. So a “draft” will remain a draft, whether you’re working in German or Danish. Searches and reports will then work the same way in every language.

Which language are we missing? And would you be interested in helping with the translation or proofreading? Get in touch — we’d love to hear from you.