Activity and time account names in several languages

If your employees don’t all read the same language, activities and time accounts can carry a name and description per language. Everyone then sees them in their own language: on their timesheet, in the team calendar, on their balances, when they request time off, in statements, reports and emails.

Why this exists

Before this, an activity or a time account had one name. Workspaces spanning two countries worked around it by putting both languages in the same field:

Sick Leave – Child’s First Sick Day / Sygdom - Barns 1. sygedag

Every employee then read half a label in a language they didn’t speak. Now each language gets its own box, and each person sees only theirs.

Naming an activity or a time account

1. Go to Settings › Activities or Settings › Time Accounts and create or open one.
2. Type the name and description in your own language. mTime assumes the language you’re using mTime in. If the text looks like another language, it says so under the field and saves the text as that language.
3. Tab out of the name. The other languages fill in automatically. On an existing item, Translate the rest fills the languages that are still empty.
4. Check what came back and correct anything you don’t like. Nothing is saved until you press Save .

The language menu next to the name shows each language and whether it has a name yet. The one marked Original is the text you typed.

Translating a catalogue you already have

On the activities or time accounts list, Translate all goes through every activity and time account that is missing a language.

1. The sheet shows how many items are missing a language and roughly how long it takes. Press Start translating .
2. The translation runs on the server. You can close the sheet or the tab: it keeps going, and the list shows which items are Translating and which are To review .
3. Once it is done, Review translations opens the results, grouped into activities and time accounts. Edit anything the translator got wrong.
4. Press Apply to save them.

Until you press Apply , nothing is written to your activities or time accounts. Stop ends a run early and keeps what it has already translated. Retry failed tries again where the translator was unavailable. Discard throws the whole run away.

Apply never:

• Replaces a translation someone wrote. It only fills languages that are empty, including any you filled in by hand while the run was going.
• Changes the item’s own name. The name you originally typed stays exactly as it is.
• Translates an item that was renamed or deleted after the run started. It is left as it is, and Apply tells you how many were.

If an item already holds two languages in one field, it gets taken apart rather than translated as a lump: the English half lands in English, the Danish half in Danish.

After adding a language

When you add a language to the workspace in Admin › Workspace, mTime points out that your activities and time accounts are not in it yet. Translate them starts a run for just that language.

What each person sees

mTime picks, in order:

1. The name in their language.
2. Failing that, the name in the workspace’s language.
3. Failing that, the name as originally written.

So a language you haven’t filled in never shows a blank. It falls back to something readable.

Searching and importing

• Search matches any language. Searching Sygdom and searching Sick Leave find the same activity, whichever language you’re reading in.
• Excel import accepts the time off activity in the Absence Type column written in any language. If two different activities answer to the same name, the import says so on that row instead of guessing.