Introduction to internationalization in Workiva

User interface internationalization in Workiva

With Workiva’s user interface (UI) internationalization, you can view the platform’s navigation, toolbars, buttons, and side panel text in certain languages. The UI internationalization adapts the text such that native speakers can view specific Workiva solutions in their native language. This allows those who are less comfortable with English to leverage Workiva for their needs.

UI internationalization coverage

UI internationalization is activated on a Workspace level, but each collaborator can select their preferred language. The list of currently supported languages for UI internationalization is expanding.

The following languages are fully supported:

• Traditional Chinese
• Japanese
• Spanish (Castilian, LatAm)
• French (France)
• French (Canada)
• German
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Italian
• Portuguese (Portugal)

The following areas are translated:

• Home/Files
• Documents
• Spreadsheets
• Presentations
• Right-hand panels
• Right-click context menus

The following areas are not translated:

• Chains
• Notifications/Emails
• Builder story - Solution customization
• Admin settings
• Backend services responses
• Entity Mgmt
• Placeholders
• XBRL
• Parseport
• Section 16 & Filing
• User generated strings or configurable UI
• Generative AI

FAQs

Why isn’t Workiva focused on localization at this time?

Localization involves making changes to the design and default setting, like changing the default measurement settings, date formats, color palettes, keyboard shortcuts, images, and icons. These types of changes take a lot of time and additional investment. Workiva may decide localization is beneficial later on but currently remains focused on UI internationalization.

Why isn’t the entire platform translated?

Workiva is currently focused on UI translations in A&I Reporting, GRC, and ESG. Our priority is to release new features in these areas in English first, which means there could be a 2-4 week turnaround time to translate navigational UI. Workiva won’t translate customizable text.

Does everyone in the Workspace or Org need to view the platform in the same language?

No, collaborators within the same Workspace can choose their language preference.

What is the difference between UI internationalization and translation of content?

In your workspaces, you can use machine translation to translate text in documents, spreadsheets, and presentations. This feature will only work on text that you have entered in the supported files.

UI internationalization is different from machine translation in a few key ways:

• With UI internationalization, a human team of translators provides the UI translations to optimize language quality. Separately, Workiva currently uses machine translation for some additional languages.
• Machine translation allows you to translate a section of a document or an entire document. 
  • To learn more about machine translation, you can look in Translate text and documents.
• Setting the locale of a document is independent of internationalization or machine translation. Locale is changed using Document Properties and controls the default settings for certain areas, such as spellcheck or currency.

Why does the language preference for the UI not save after my browser cache is cleared?

The Workiva UI language setting is saved in the browser's cache for performance reasons. However, in some cases, the local storage value may be cleared after closing the browser due to an enforced IT policy. To work around this, try bookmarking the Workiva login page with an included query string that controls the language selection (e.g. adding ?locale=es_ES to the end of a Workiva URL can force the UI language to Spanish).

Here's a list of all supported UI display languages that are human translated: