Moving software into another language looks at first like translating labels. In a workshop you could hardly say the work even begins there. What is read on screen is usually not a word but a measurement: width, height, thickness, quantity. How those numbers are written changes from language to language, and a badly written measurement costs far more than a badly translated menu heading. Working in several languages therefore stops being a question of vocabulary and becomes a question of correctness.
The interface works in nine languages: Turkish, English, German, Dutch, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Arabic and Persian. The last two are written right to left, and that changes more than text alignment; the order of table columns, the side margins and the direction of icons all change with it. Treating writing direction as a setting bolted on afterwards means half the screen sits backwards in those languages. Direction is therefore kept as information that travels together with the language itself.
Digits are a separate matter. In Arabic and Persian the numbers are written in Latin form, because an Eastern Arabic digit is not read on a measurement that goes to the bench. The operator is not reading text at that moment; they are reading a number and transferring it onto glass. A digit shape they are not used to produces hesitation, and hesitation produces mistakes. Making that decision once and applying it to every screen guarantees the same behaviour across all nine languages.
Glass names are not translated but generated. The ready catalogue holds more than seventy thousand records, and translating each of them into six languages by hand is not possible. Instead the parts of the name are kept separately: thickness, type, colour. The visible name is built from those parts according to the language. The name is a grammar rather than a sentence. Writing the rule once takes the place of translating tens of thousands of records, and when a new record is added the translation is handled by itself.
On the document side the language is independent of the interface. A quotation or order document is produced in the recipient's language, so a workshop working in Turkish still sends a German document to Germany. That distinction looks small but for an exporting business it is the work itself. A document the other side cannot read has the same effect as a document never sent, and usually opens one more round of correspondence.
The real benefit of working in several languages shows up on the team side. Two people looking at the same record can work in different languages with no translation step between them, because what is translated is the presentation and not the record. The record is single; how it reads changes with the person. That also means someone new can start in their own language and still see exactly the same data.