Customizable Translations and Language Management

[dschipfel]

Hello FreeITSM Team,

I would like to suggest an enhancement regarding the language and translation management within FreeITSM.

Current Situation

While FreeITSM already supports multiple languages, there are still areas within the application where translations are missing or incomplete. Additionally, organizations currently have no easy way to adjust translations themselves when certain terms do not match their internal terminology.

Proposed Enhancement

Add a translation management section under the System settings that allows administrators to:

• View existing translations
• Modify existing translations
• Add missing translations
• Define organization-specific terminology
• Export and import translation files

Practical Use Cases

Every company uses different terminology. For example:

• "Requester" may be called "Anforderer"
• "Agent" may be called "Mitarbeiter"
• "Asset" may be called "Inventarobjekt" or "Arbeitsmittel"

Being able to customize these terms would allow organizations to adapt FreeITSM to their own processes and language standards.

Missing Translations

It would also be helpful if administrators could identify untranslated texts directly within the interface and provide missing translations without having to modify source files.

Benefits

• Improved user experience
• Consistent terminology across the organization
• Faster localization of new features
• Reduced dependency on software updates for translation corrections
• Better acceptance among end users

Additional Ideas

• Show untranslated labels in a dedicated overview
• Support multiple custom language packs
• Allow export/import of translations for sharing between FreeITSM installations
• Keep custom translations intact during updates

Example

An administrator notices that a menu entry or field label is only displayed in English. Instead of waiting for a future release, they could directly add or adjust the translation within the administration interface and make it immediately available to all users.

I believe this feature would greatly improve the flexibility and usability of FreeITSM, especially for organizations operating in non-English environments or using company-specific terminology.

Thank you for considering this suggestion. I would be interested to know whether such a translation management feature is already planned or if there are existing workarounds available.

Best regards, Daniel

[edmozley]

Hi Daniel - thank you for all of these amazing ideas. I will be looking to implement them over the course of this week and will keep you posted.

The translation management is a slightly tricky one as I have deliberately avoided storing translation in the MySQL database for performance reasons - but I will see what I can do. I think your point about specific overrides is an important one.

In the meantime, please can you let me know what country you are from and I will do a big sweep this evening to make sure your language files are as up to date as possible!

Thanks!

Ed

[dschipfel]

Hi Ed,

Thanks for the update!
I'm based in Germany.

Best regards, Daniel

[edmozley]

Hi Daniel - I've had a good push on the German language files and so if you pull the latest versions, you should notice an improvement. They are now approximately 70% complete - up from roughly 50%. Also check out the other commits as I've been quite busy these last few days adding things!