One Language Setting: The App, Your E-mails and Your PDFs Finally Agree
Why the language hangs on the account rather than the screen, and everything that quietly follows it.
A Flemish operator picks Dutch on the warehouse tablet, walks to the office, opens the same account on a desktop and gets English. A French buyer receives a settlement notification in the language of whoever clicked the button in Rotterdam. Both are small, both are daily, and both are the kind of thing that makes software feel foreign in the literal sense. The platform has one answer to them: the language is a property of the account, not of the screen.
One preference, changed from anywhere
Tenant users change their language under Settings > Account > Preferences. Trade-in portal users change it on the portal’s profile page. Warehouse operators change it in the account card of the mobile receiving and testing screens and in the header of the mobile capture screen. All of these write the same preference, so the tablet and the desktop agree the next time either loads. The choice covers interface text only — it does not switch region, date format or currency. The public website keeps its own language choice, deliberately separate from the app.
Five languages
The app speaks English, Dutch, French, German and Spanish. English is the source text; the others are translations of it, which is why a brand-new label may occasionally appear in English for a short while before its translation lands.
Errors that speak your language
An error that comes back from the server is phrased in the user’s language — including in the seconds right after switching, when the screen and the server could easily disagree. A Dutch operator who just went Dutch does not get one last English reprimand.
E-mails in the recipient’s language
Notification and support-ticket e-mails are written in the language of the person receiving them: their account preference if they have one, otherwise their browser language, otherwise English. Not the language of whoever performed the action. The German buyer gets German, whatever the seller speaks.
PDFs, numbers and dates
Invoices, evidence packages, ESG reports and escrow documents render in the language of the user who creates them or of the customer they are for — and “language” here includes number and date formats. Amounts always show the currency of the record itself, laid out in the notation of the app language: an English screen shows €1,234.50, a Dutch one € 1.234,50, a French one 1 234,50 €. A dollar invoice stays a dollar invoice on a euro tenant’s screen. And amounts in different currencies are never silently added up: where several currencies are in view, each gets its own line, and a row that cannot be totalled says so in words.
The manual follows too
The in-app manual shows the Dutch manual when the app is in Dutch and the English manual in every other language, and says so in one line at the top, so a French operator knows why the manual is in English rather than wondering whether something is broken. It’s not a glitch. It’s a sentence.