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Languages & localization

Operentra is bilingual end to end: the entire product — every admin screen, the employee portal, system emails, and generated documents (salary slips, employment agreements, HR letters) — is available in English and Arabic, with full right-to-left layout for Arabic.

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 no Arabic variant of a given email exists.

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.

Two 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's English wording keeps its customization authoritative: Arabic recipients are not silently served the stock Arabic text of a template the workspace rewrote.

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.

What it controls:

  • Salary slips — generated in the document language (title, labels, amount-in-words, dates, the e-signature statute note).
  • Employment agreements — the default agreement used when issuing a contract, including the UAE-specific agreement for UAE workspaces. The Arabic execution is the one that prevails before MOHRE and UAE courts.
  • HR letters — automatically issued letters (confirmation, promotion, experience certificates on offboarding…) pick the document-language variant of the letter template.
  • Tax certificates — currently Pakistan-only and issued in English (the FBR context is English; there is no Arabic-market audience for it).

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.

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.

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 both 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.
  • Values composed at send time — a handful of variable values inside emails and letters (e.g. a month name embedded in a subject line) may still appear in English inside Arabic content. The template language is correct; localizing these composed values is tracked as follow-up work.
  • 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.