Language settings and its importance in Salesforce.

Language settings and its importance in Salesforce

As Salesforce is being used across the globe and we all use different languages to communicate, Salesforce supports multiple languages. The Salesforce web user interface, Salesforce for Outlook, Connect for Outlook, Connect Offline, and Connect for Office are all available in various languages.

The Salesforce web user interface supports two language settings.

Personal settings

Let's start with an example. Tom is a new hire from Russia. The default organization language is set to English, which means all the text and online help are displayed to all the new users in English. Tom would like to change his complete user interface to Russian.

Users can change the default language to their local language to display the Salesforce text, images, buttons, and online help.

To change to your personal language, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Name | My Setting | Personal | Language & Time zone.

2. Then, select the language from the Language drop-down list:

You can find more information about the language Salesforce supports as the standard language in the information box.

Note: If you are not able to find your preferred language, then contact your system administrator to enable it. In the preceding example, the system administrator enabled the English, Deutsch, Español, François, and Italiano languages for the organization so that users can get these options under the Language drop-down list.

Organization's default language settings

A system administrator can enable multiple languages for your Salesforce organization. This means users have the option to select their preferred language from the available list.

Salesforce offers three levels of language support, as follows:

1. Fully supported languages
2. End user languages
3. Platform-only languages

Fully supported languages

Fully supported languages, such as Thai, Russian, English, or Danish, are the ones where the user functionality and help pages in the application are completely translated into these languages.

Note: The fully-supported languages list includes Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, and Thai. Even though the Salesforce interface is completely translated to Thai, the help page remains in English

End user languages

End user languages are useful when you are working in a multilingual organization where you speak a language that is different than your headquarters. End user languages are used by users who would like to access the app in that language, but do not want to access the Setup menu.

Let's start with an example. A company has its headquarters in a French-speaking country, but that company has non-admin employees in other countries that would prefer to use the app in a language supported as an EUL. As they do not want to access the Setup menu and help pages, the EUL settings provide sufficient translations out of the box to suit their needs.

Note: The end user languages list includes Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, English (U.K.), Greek, Spanish (Mexico), Hebrew, Hungarian, Indonesian, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Turkish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese

Enabling an end user language

To enable an end user language for your organization, follow these steps:

1. Navigate to Setup | Administer | Company Profile | Language Settings.

2. From the Language Preferences section, select the Enable End User Languages checkbox to enable it:

 3. Then, it will add all the end user languages to the available language multi-select picklist.

 4. Click on Save.

Platform-only languages

Platform-only languages are used to localize the custom functionality (apps) built on the Salesforce Platform. The platform-only languages allow organizations to provide their own translations via the translation workbench for languages that Salesforce doesn't provide any translations for.

Note: The platform-only languages list includes Albanian, Armenian, Basque, Bosnian, Croatian, English (Australia), English (Canada), English (India), English (Malaysia), English (Philippines), Estonian, French (Canada), Georgian, Hindi, Icelandic, Irish, Latvian, Lithuanian, Luxembourgish, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Moldovan, Montenegrin, Portuguese (European), Romansh, Serbian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Tagalog, Urdu, and Welsh.

Enabling the platform-only languages

To enable the platform-only languages for your organization, follow these steps: 

1. Navigate to Setup | Administer | Company Profile | Language Settings.

2. From Language Preferences, select Enable Platform Only Languages:

3. This will add all the end user languages to the available language multi-select picklist.

4. Click on Save.

Once you enable the platform-only language, Salesforce will enable the end user language automatically.

Note: What happens when the system administrator changes the organization's default language from English to Russian if the user's personal language preference is already set as Russian?.The user will still see Salesforce in Russian. If a personal preference is not set, then Salesforce will automatically change everything from English to Russian 

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