Skip to main content

Languages & localization

Operentra works in five languages end to end: English, Arabic, French, German and Spanish. Every admin screen, the employee portal, system emails, and generated documents (salary slips, employment agreements, HR letters, tax statements) are available in all five, with full right-to-left layout for Arabic.

Every interface language is also a content language: whichever of the five a person reads on screen, they can receive their emails in it, and a workspace can issue its documents in it. The employee's Email language, the workspace's Default email language and Document language pickers all offer the five. The exception is the country-specific statutory forms, which keep their own languages — see Country-specific forms.

The design recognizes that "language" is not one setting. Three different things carry language, and they deliberately follow three different owners:

SurfaceFollowsSet where
The app UIThe person's browser/deviceGlobe icon in the top bar
Emails & notificationsThe recipientPortal → My Profile, or the prompt after switching UI language
Documents of recordThe workspaceWorkspace Settings → Language

This page explains each, and how they interact.

UI language​

Every signed-in surface (admin and portal) carries a globe icon in the top bar. Picking a language switches the interface immediately — labels, menus, toasts, validation messages — and remembers the choice in that browser.

  • The choice is per browser, per device. It is not stored on the account, so a phone and an office desktop can be in different languages.
  • First-time visitors get their browser's language automatically: someone whose browser is set to Arabic sees Operentra in Arabic on first load.
  • Arabic flips the entire layout to right-to-left — navigation, tables, forms and documents mirror correctly rather than merely translating text.

Switching the UI language changes only what that person sees on that device. It never silently changes what emails they receive or what documents the workspace issues — those are separate, explicit choices below.

Email language (follows the recipient)​

Emails are personal correspondence, so they follow the person receiving them, not the workspace. An Arabic-speaking employee and their English-speaking colleague at the same company each get system emails in their own language.

Resolution order for every outbound email:

  1. The employee's own preference, if they have set one.
  2. The workspace default email language (Workspace Settings → Language) — the fallback for employees with no preference, and for recipients who are not employees.
  3. English, if a given email has no variant in that language.

All 112 library email templates exist in all five languages.

An employee sets their preference in two places:

  • Portal → My Profile carries a permanent Email language selector.
  • After switching the UI language with the globe, a one-time banner offers to match their email language too ("you're now browsing in العربية — want your emails in العربية as well?"). Accepting updates the preference; dismissing it never asks again for that language. The banner exists because someone trying out a UI language shouldn't have their email language silently rewritten.

Implementation details worth knowing:

  • The system identifies the employee by the recipient address even when the sending code doesn't explicitly say who the email is for — so the preference is honored uniformly across every trigger (leave decisions, slip emails, password resets, reminders, and so on). Emails to non-employees (job candidates, external contacts) use the workspace default.
  • A workspace that customized an email template keeps its customization authoritative. A recipient gets, in order: the workspace's own copy in their language; the workspace's own English copy (so a rewritten English template is not bypassed by the stock translations); the standard template in their language; the standard English. Customizing only one translation never stops the email for recipients in other languages.
  • The in-app notification bell renders each recipient's copy in their language too.

Dates inside emails​

Dates and month names written into an email — leave dates, attendance and overtime dates, the payroll month ("June 2026"), a loan's start month, the payment date — are worded in the language of the email actually rendered, in every language including Arabic. (They used to stay in English, "05 Feb 2026", inside translated emails.) English emails read exactly as before.

Missing-punch reminders show shift times on the 24-hour clock in non-English emails; English keeps "09:00 AM".

Document language (follows the workspace)​

Contracts, HR letters, salary slips and tax certificates are documents of record — they get archived, audited, and produced to banks and government authorities. If every employee's copy were in a different language, the company's own archive would become unreviewable. So documents follow the workspace, through a single setting:

Workspace Settings → Language → Document language.

These library documents exist in all five languages:

  • the 12 HR letter designs;
  • the generic (Standard) employment agreement;
  • the salary slip, in every country statute variant;
  • the generic tax statement, Statement of Earnings and Tax Withheld.

What the setting controls, and which variant is issued:

  • Salary slips — generated in the document language (title, labels, amount-in-words, dates, the e-signature statute note): the document-language variant first, English as the fallback. Within a language, the country's statute variant beats the generic one. A workspace that picked the stock slip design in the gallery picked the design: it is issued in the document-language variant of that design. A workspace's own clone is used exactly as chosen.
  • HR letters — automatically issued letters (confirmation, promotion, experience certificates on offboarding…) pick the document-language variant of the letter template, with English as the fallback.
  • Employment agreements — the country's own design comes first, then the document language, then English. A UAE workspace gets the UAE-specific agreement; issuing in French, it gets the UAE agreement in English — never the generic French agreement. The Arabic execution of the UAE agreement is the one that prevails before MOHRE and UAE courts. A workspace whose country has no agreement of its own gets the standard agreement in its document language.
  • Tax certificates (issued only where the country levies income tax) — the same rule as agreements: the country's own design first, then the document language, then English. A Pakistani workspace gets the Pakistani certificate in English; a workspace whose country has no certificate of its own gets the Statement of Earnings and Tax Withheld in its document language.

If a template has no variant in the document language, the system falls back to English rather than failing — and everything language-sensitive in the render (words, month names, dates) follows the template actually rendered, so a fallback never produces a mixed-language document.

Country-specific forms keep their languages​

A statutory form written for one country's law keeps the languages it was written in:

FormLanguages
UAE employment agreementEnglish, Arabic
Pakistani tax certificateEnglish

Because the country's own design outranks the document language, these forms are issued in English when the document language is one they do not exist in. In the same way, the agreement template gallery of a UAE workspace shows only the UAE design (English and Arabic), not the generic agreement's other languages.

The phrases an agreement fills in from the country's employment-law data — the governing-law jurisdiction, the statute citations, the identity-document label and the leave year — are worded in the agreement's language: fully in French, German and Spanish. The Arabic agreement names the jurisdiction in Arabic; statute titles stay in their official English form. (These phrases used to be English inside every language's agreement.)

Template previews​

Previews of contract, salary slip and tax statement templates render their sample values in the language the template is written in, read from its <html lang> attribute.

Rewording the stock text​

The French, German and Spanish texts are newly written. As with every library template, a workspace can clone any of them and reword it.

Issued documents remember their language​

Every issued contract, letter, slip and certificate is stamped with the language it was actually produced in. The workspace setting can change years later; the stamp means the public verification page (/verify/…) keeps describing the paper in the holder's hands, and a signed contract keeps reporting the language it was signed in.

Amounts in words in French, German and Spanish​

Amounts spelled out in French, German and Spanish include the currency noun, with correct agreement: "vingt et une livres sterling", "un million d'euros", "eine Rupie", "veintiún dólares", "doscientas libras esterlinas". As in English, they spell whole units only. Salary slips in these languages print the words alone, with no "Only" formula.

Cheques in these languages add the cents as a fraction — "… euros et 45/100", "… Euro und 45/100", "… dólares con 45/100" — again with no "Only" formula.

Arabic specifics​

Arabic support goes beyond translated strings:

  • Right-to-left layout throughout — the app shell, and the documents themselves (mirrored tables, accent borders, column order).
  • Amounts in words use a real Arabic number-words engine following the commercial/banking convention (تفقيط): correct duals (ألفان), 3–10 plurals (ثلاثة آلاف), the 11–99 accusative (خمسون درهمًا), and construct forms before the currency noun (خمسون ألف درهم). Currency nouns and minor units are included — e.g. 17,789.50 AED renders as «سبعة عشر ألفًا وسبعمائة وتسعة وثمانون درهمًا وخمسون فلسًا».
  • Dates render with Arabic month names on the Gregorian calendar («06 يوليو 2026»).
  • Digits stay Latin (1234, not ١٢٣٤) everywhere — amounts, dates, IDs — matching regional business convention and keeping figures unambiguous across languages.
  • Generated PDFs ship with Arabic-capable fonts, so shaping and ligatures are correct in downloads and email attachments, not just on screen.

What is not translated (by design)​

  • Tenant data — employee names, department and designation names, notes, and other values your workspace typed in are rendered as entered.
  • Seeded lookup data — default designations, leave type names and similar reference data are seeded in English regardless of language settings. A signup-time choice of seed language is designed but deliberately deferred.