Truly bilingual sales documents in Odoo
Odoo translates its own labels into the recipient's language, but any text you add stays locked in the language it was typed in. A customized document therefore ends up bilingual by accident.
The need
As soon as a company sells abroad, its documents must go out in the recipient's language. A quote, an invoice or a delivery slip that is half French and half English looks amateurish, and makes life harder for the accounting team on the other side.
The trap is that the problem does not show up right away. As long as you use the original documents, everything is translated. The mix starts the moment you customize a template, which any company that wants its own wording on its documents will do.
Text added to an Odoo document is not translated automatically. It has to be made conditional, and tied to the right language source for each document.
What Odoo does out of the box, and where it stops
The original labels are translated, yours are not
Odoo translates what it shipped. Any wording added by an integrator or by the client stays in the language it was typed in, and the document becomes mixed.
The delivery slip does not follow the customer's language
It is rendered in the language of the delivery address, not that of the main customer. Text conditioned on the wrong source produces a document that mixes two languages.
PDF files come out with unreadable names
In the inbox of a buyer who receives twenty documents a day, a badly named file is a lost file, and one more follow-up for you.
Maintaining two sets of templates does not hold up
The intuitive solution, one French set and one English set, doubles the maintenance and always ends up drifting apart at the first change.
What we built
A complete set of bilingual documents
Quote, order confirmation, invoice, credit note, delivery slip and purchase order. Seventeen templates made conditional, a single set to maintain.
The right language source for each document
The customer for sales and invoicing, the delivery address for the delivery slip. It stays consistent with the original behavior, and never produces a mixed document.
The company's own wording
The original labels are replaced with the client's own, in French and in English. The documents speak the company's language, in both languages.
File names you can actually use
Document number and customer name in the PDF file name, so documents stay easy to identify in buyers' inboxes.
What it looks like
The result
Documents go out in the right language, across the whole document chain, without maintaining two sets of templates in parallel.
The work carries over to any other language. The challenge is not the number of languages, it is tying each document to the right source, and leaving nothing locked in the added wording.
Do your documents really go out in your customer's language?
The test is simple. Send yourself a quote in English from your Odoo and look at the wording you added. If it stayed in French, we know what to do.
Let's talk about your case