Languages in the global market
A CMMS (Computerized Maintenance Management System) contains vast amounts of critical information, but if your maintenance technicians don’t speak the language the CMMS uses then it’s all useless. For this reason, making your product multilingual is key to reaching a larger potential client pool. The problem is a CMMS translation isn’t easy to make, and can take an awful lot of time. So the goal Labs set out with was to see if we could generate a full CMMS translation with just one click.
Do developers dream of multilingual sheep?
It was a dream, and a rather lofty one at that, but with perseverance and the Google API (application programming interface), the Google Translate Tool was forged. This tool allows a user to select from over ninety different languages and translate the majority of the CMMS within seconds. The Google Translate Tool is not a replacement for the official localization language packs, but it is free and available for any Fiix CMMS user. Here’s how you can activate it:
CMMS administrators can log into their CMMS, and go to “Settings”, where there will be a new section called “Labs Beta”. By clicking on it, you will see the Labs settings which contains a section called “Google Translate”.
To turn on the Google Translate Tool, check the box, click the save button at the top of the screen, and agree to Google’s Terms of Service. Once done, the page will automatically attempt to refresh. This is necessary to load the tool.
Once reloaded, the top of the page will have this addition.
Voila! You now have the google translate tool activated and ready to go. The best part is that using it is even simpler. Just click on the new drop-down box at the top of the screen and select a language.
And there you have it. After a brief period updating, your CMMS is now in a different language.
There’s a couple shortcomings in this tool, which is why it is still in beta. Not every word in Google Translation will have a proper translation and there may be grammatical issues as well. Also, due to Google Translate’s constant attempts at improving itself, the translations may change over time, for better or worse.
Note that the Google Translate Tool will not alter the data within input fields in the CMMS, and for good reason.
If it did, then when the forms saved, they would be saving the translated data instead of the original information. This could lead to data corruption, so we don’t allow it; however, having the ability to translate the rest of the CMMS can be a pretty powerful tool, even if it’s not perfect.
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