Did you know you can manage languages yourself in TimeControl?

TimeControl has had multi-lingual capabilities since it’s first release in 1994.  Over the years the functionality of the Manage Languages feature has expanded.  The function is part of the Maintenance Menu and so it’s never typically seen by most users.  Even for Administrators, managing languages is rarely thought of once a system is in production.

The TimeControl Manage Languages feature allows you to create, adjust or delete language selections and then even change the wording of menus, fields, messages and more to suit your own corporate lexicon.  There are a number of languages shipped with TimeControl but not all the languages have complete translations.  We do our best to keep the English, French and Spanish language files completely up to date for all terms.   There are other language files included which are more targeted at just the timesheet users.  What a client will often do is to make a copy of their main language, let’s say English to have their own version and then adjust the language to suit their own needs.  Perhaps the word Charge Code is better thought of as Task Code.  No problem.  Perhaps the error messages that TimeControl uses need to be adjusted for your own standards.  No problem.  Just make the changes and save them.

You can even create a new translation.  Let’s say you want to add Flemish to the language file for your Belgian users.  You can do so and add your own translation items.  Remember 95% of your users only need to see the timesheet and menus so the actual translation challenge you are facing is likely quite limited.

Ah, you say, but what about upgrades?  Will we lose all our work adjusting the text in TimeControl?  You will not.  The TimeControl upgrade process looks at the language definitions to see if any new translations need to be added but if it finds that you have made a change already, it will skip that item and move on.  So, any translation work you do for any of the existing TimeControl language translation definitions are unaffected.

The Manage Languages function in TimeControl is just one more way we make the product flexible for users.