Monday, April 08, 2013

Errors in Swedish translation

As many of you have been aware, working with the Swedish translation of Dynamics CRM, there are some annoying bugs. One of these has been around for quite some time, I think at least since CRM 3.0 and maybe as long as 1.2, a cannot remember, even though I worked with that version.

The bug I am referring to is the translation of both Subject and Regarding to "Ämne" in Activities. This looks really strange in CRM as this is one of the most common entities. An annoyance for many partners has also been that both these fields are system fields which makes their labels quite hard to change. You cannot just go into the normal field settings and change the display name. There are some workarounds out there, of which I think the best one is to use the translation file to change the display name (which I think has worked for me a couple of times any how).

The other one faced in CRM 2011 and is the translation of the two buttons "Delete" and "Remove" in a solution. These have both been named "Ta bort". Again this is not very thoughtful and has obviously not been done by anyone who works with CRM.

In this case the effects can be rather drastic, as the difference is huge. If you plan to remove a custom entity from you solution containing 3 million rows of data, and press the wrong "Ta bort"-button, you will accidentally remove all 3 million rows of data. With CRM Online currently lacking any manual backup functionality, this means that you have lost these 3 million rows. Thankfully there is a confirm dialog, and the users working inside solutions are usually rather savvy so they know what they are doing.

Still, the fixes are simple, just fix the labels in the default translations. I hereby volunteer to Review the translation for the Swedish MUI if asked at no cost, just to make sure we can remove these kinds of errors.

I have submitted these as feedback to Microsoft Connect, if you agree with me that Microsoft should fix this, do sign up and vote for them.

This is the link for the Ämne-issue:
https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/feedback/details/783135/error-in-swedish-translation-same-word-used-twice-mne

And this is the link for "Ta Bort":
https://connect.microsoft.com/dynamicssuggestions/feedback/details/783226/delete-and-remove-in-solutions-translated-to-same-word-in-swedish


Gustaf Westerlund
MVP, CEO and owner at CRM-konsulterna AB
www.crmkonsulterna.se

4 comments:

  1. Hello Gustaf,

    Without even going so far as discussing the issues arising within the Swedish translation, I am having an "Invalid Parameter" error when trying to enable a language in a MS Dynamics CRM 2011 Online platform on which I have the new "Yammer Configuration" option in Settings > Administration.

    On the platforms that do not yet have that upgrade, enabling/disabling a language seems to work fine.

    By any chance, would you have noticed that behaviour?

    Kind regards,

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  2. Do not know what can be wrong. Make sure that you have the right version of the MUI pack. Don't know if the Yammer integration is relevant.

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  3. We have the same issue with the Delete button in Finnish language version. There are also several other annoying little details, like "View" tabs labelled as "Show", "Language" as "Language skills" etc.

    Then there are the really funny ones, such as the default connection roles in the Family category, where Parent is "upper level" and Child "lower level".

    If we go to the customization UI in Finnish (we try to use English base language wherever possible), then things can get really crazy. For example, trying to understand what Configurable Cascading settings in their Finnish translation "definable overlap" would relate to without knowing the original terminology would be practically impossible.

    I do understand that there aren't always good options available when translating technical vocabulary that in practice doesn't exist in the target language. Still, for the end user UI terminology I wish there was a convenient way for the Dynamics community to suggest better translations and get them published as part of Update Rollups.

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  4. Interesting input Jukka, I just hope that Microsoft would ask us to review it. I would, as I said in the article, do it for free just to make sure it would be better for us all.

    ReplyDelete