In this article I would like to talk about the problems that can cause certain translations that have been made into Spanish in Dynamics 365 Commerce.

I won’t be telling you anything new when I tell you that sometimes translations are not as good as you would expect. I’m going to go to a situation that is a little more far-fetched than the case of calling “Customer payment journals” to something that I think it would be more appropriate to call “Customer collection journals”, which can shock anyone who starts in Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to make a list of translations that I consider unfortunate, but I will focus on two very specific cases that at the time frightened me and by extension some of my clients, which could have led to an uncomfortable situation.

First case
First case: Let me put you in the situation. I was making a presentation to a customer about the Loyalty functionality in a newly opened Dynamics 365 FnO. I was asked to configure different levels of the Loyalty Program and … SURPRISE!, and the following message appears:

Translations are the devil’s work Axazure

Basically, the message says not to use this tiered functionality, because it is only compatible with earlier versions of the product. I guess they meant that it only worked with earlier versions of POS.

I’m used to having client environments in Spanish, so I didn’t realise until the colleague who accompanied me, who usually has the tool in English, alerted me. THE MESSAGE MEANT THE OPPOSITE. This level functionality was not compatible with previous versions, so if a user wanted to use D365 as HQ and keep the AX2012 POS they were going to run into a problem.

Fortunately, it doesn’t affect if you want to use the D365 POS as well, as was the case. And although he could have had a scare, we were able to resolve it quickly by explaining the translation error and showing him how the loyalty levels worked.

Second case
On this occasion, I was forced to open a case to Microsoft, since the problem I encountered had no solution.

Coincidentally, a few days before, our client’s POS printer had died, and on top of that we had to reinstall another device on the same computer, as the shop had changed ownership. A few days after the printer had decided to take a well-deserved rest, users started to notify us of a suspicious message: was it related to the hardware profile, was the new printer not compatible, was the reinstallation of the device causing the printer drivers not to be updated, or was the new configuration not being applied because of a problem with the offline database?

The message did not come up every day, and usually occurred after the POS had gone offline. I leave it here:

During the first session with Microsoft support, we were able to detect the translation error. To carry out the session, we had previously changed the language of the POS to English and when the message was displayed,we were able to contrast the difference between English and Spanish. This time it was not a question of confusing the meaning of whether or not something can be done. While the Spanish message can be interpreted as a configuration error, the English one makes the message much clearer: we had exceeded the cash limit allowed at the cash desk!

This is a standard message related to the configuration of the shop’s payment methods. In the end an “error” without any relation to the configuration.

So, as a piece of advice, when something sounds strange to you, change it to English before opening a complaint to Microsoft or giving a customer a heart attack.

Translations of eCommerce deserve a separate point. The following image is a good example. The translation of the message does not alter the meaning of the functionality, but it does destroy the size of the design.