Depending on your business, you might need to operate in several languages or different time zones. For example; if you live in a country that has several national languages, like Switzerland. Maybe your customers are tourists, you host international guests, or you give online training to people in multiple countries. In these cases, and many others, you want your website and scheduling software to reflect the international identity of your business.
Customers appreciate when you speak their language and SuperSaaS does just that. We support over 30 languages including right-to-left languages such as Arabic that will reconfigure the interface to be easily and intuitively usable. You do not have to pick one language or time zone and go with that. SuperSaaS offers the possibility to automatically let the system adapt to the language and time zone of the customer, so all screens, subsequent emails and messages will be displayed in the correct language and time for that particular customer.
Allow the user to self-select the language
SuperSaaS offers several options which can be used individually or in any combination. The easiest option is to let your customers adjust the calendar’s language themselves. In your account, through Layout Settings, you can set a default language and select that customers can choose their own language. When a customer visits your calendar, they will be able to choose their preferred language by using the country flags at the top of the page. All system generated text in the calendar change accordingly.
In the Layout Settings menu, there is also an option to set the time zone. Besides setting a default time zone for your account, you can “Allow users to show the time in their own time zone”. That way the times displayed to a customer are always contiguous with their local time zone, rather than the default time zone as set by you. When you ask customers to register, a time zone will be selected automatically based on the IP address, which they can manually adjust if needed.
It’s important to note that the date notation will be the same for everyone, so if your customers are spread across different countries or continents, you will probably want to choose a date format that is commonly used and will be understood regardless of location.
Read more about working with different time zones.
Pre-select the language for the user with a query string
If you already know the customers preferred language, then it’s possible to add a so-called “query string” to the link to your calendar. That way, the user will see the calendar in his own language when he arrives on the page (he can still change it later, of course).
Let’s say you live in the UK and have set the default language of your calendars to English, but you have a new, international customer that doesn’t speak the language very well, and you want to offer the calendar in their first language, Spanish. By adding ?lang=xx to the calendar URL (where xx is the two-letter country code) you can easily accomplish this; the user will now see the calendar in Spanish. This option is available for any of the 32 languages SuperSaaS supports.
By using the following links to one of our online tutorials, you can see how this works in action:
English:
https://www.supersaas.com/schedule/demo/Conversation_lessons?lang=en
French:
https://www.supersaas.com/schedule/demo/Conversation_lessons?lang=fr
Spanish:
https://www.supersaas.com/schedule/demo/Conversation_lessons?lang=es
Change displayed text based on language
Using one or more of the options above, your customer will see the calendar and all system generated text in their preferred language. Your own additions, however, will still be shown in their original language (e.g. the text above the calendar).
You can customize these on-screen messages, so these will be automatically adjusted based on the language selected as well. This can be achieved by using what’s called ‘autotext’. Autotext strings are a set of words that are automatically replaced by something else when the message is generated. A well known example is “Dear $name” at the top of an email, where $name will be replaced by the name of the customer.
The autotext string to use is $if action. When using an $if statement, the rest of the sentence is only triggered if action matches the current action. The action in this case is a language identifier, like ES or FR. Next, you put the text you want to show between curly brackets {text you want to show when the language is set to Spanish}.
Your auto text string will look like this:
$if ES {Buenos días}
The system will check the language that has been set for the customer (either with the query string or by using the language flags) and, in case it’s Spanish, show this particular text instead of your default text. For any other languages this can be set up in a similar way:
$if FR {Bonjour}
$if EN {Good morning}
In the system this will look as follows:
Using autotext for confirmations and reminders
Your calendar and all on-screen messages are now completely customized, but you want this to reflect in email confirmations and reminders as well. Autotext for confirmations and reminders can be added via the Layout tab (under Configure) and works the same as for on-screen messages; the one difference is that you put the action between quotes.
This means that your autotext string will now look like this:
$if "ES" {Gracias}
$if "FR" {Merci}
$if "EN" {Thank you}
In the above list we also put an autotext string for English. Another way to trigger the system to show the text in your most used language is by using $else:
$if "ES" {Gracias} $else {Thank you}
You want to make sure that you use straight quotes (") and not curly quotes (“), or the system won’t be able to recognize the autotext string.
On our website you can find many more suggestions for customizing on-screen messages and confirmations and reminders.
We hope these tips & tricks will help you make the most out of SuperSaaS in an international, multi-language environment, but please reach out if you have any further questions.