Dynamics 365 F&O/AX Dynamics 365 CE / CRM Dynamics GP Business Central / NAV UG Dynamics SL Power Platform Fabric UG MS Copilot UG

[Oxana Pisareva]

Hello everyone, 

I have been doing a research for a product that will allow us to translate customer invoices from English to Chinese in GP. I came across Multilingual GP add-on that seems to have the functionality we are looking for. However, when I tried looking up the company that developed the software and search the details of the products itself I couldn’t find anything. Does anyone know if Multilingual GP add-on still exists and, if not, can anyone recommend a similar product?

Thanks, 

Oxana

——————————
Oxana Pisareva
Vancouver BC
——————————

[Dan Troxell]

Earlier this year we had a potential need to add multi language capabilities to GP and I did a fairly extensive search for solutions.  The product you are referring to, “Multilingual GP” was discontinued some years ago and I was not able to find any other products in development.

——————————
Dan Troxell
Dynamics GP System Admin
Subway
Milford CT
————————————————————————-

[Oxana Pisareva]

Hi Dan, 

Thank you very much for your reply! Multilingual GP or a similar solution would have solved the challenge we are having perfectly. It is unfortunate that this add-on product was discontinued. 

We will have to refine our processes then. 

Thanks again for your help!

——————————
Oxana Pisareva
The Herschel Supply Company
Vancouver BC
————————————————————————-

[Rob Klaproth]

There is one other way you could go about this, depending on how much data needs to be translated.  My guess is that the multi-lingual product probably only transmitted the field descriptions and the text on the invoices, but the actual part numbers and descriptions still came from DB.  If I am wrong, correct me.

Anyway, you could just get a translator to translate your invoice and then use a product like Forms Printer and use either SQL Reports (SSRS) or Crystal Reports and assign specific invoice types by country of the customer or by class or whatever field you want to use.

Then when you go to print an invoice, the report logic would look at the country and do something like this:

 if customer.country = ‘China’ THEN “USETHISTEXT” ELSE  “USETHATTEXT”

With SSRS and Crystal, you can use IF then statements to evaluate every field or line in your invoice, so you can have it translate the header information, the instructions at the bottom, or any other items you need.  You can display different logos for your US customers versus the China ones, etc.

It’s very complex, but if you get a good translator and have them work with a trusted GP partner who has experience making these invoices in a product like Forms Printer, you should be able to accomplish the same thing.

I’m guessing you could even translate the part  numbers or descriptions in SQL if you needed to do that as well, just have an alternate table that you populate with the China descriptions, and have the report query that table instead of the regular one.. I.e. IV00101 and then have another table IV00101_CN that would have the China info.   You would have to have some sort of SQL job or script that kept the other table updated or it would be a nightmare, and of course you would always have to be translating the descriptions if that’s what you need.    It depends on how many part numbers, if you have thousands I would use SQL, but if you only have a small number (I.e. 5-10 you could use the if.. Then logic in Crystal or SSRS to do the translating).

Now if you’re talking the actual “data entry” screens inside of GP, that is a COMPLETELY different story, and one, unfortunately that has no easy answer as Microsoft has clearly defined the languages they will support for the UI and do not appear to have any intentions of making GP for any additional languages in the future. 🙂

——Original Message——

Hi Dan, 

Thank you very much for your reply! Multilingual GP or a similar solution would have solved the challenge we are having perfectly. It is unfortunate that this add-on product was discontinued. 

We will have to refine our processes then. 

Thanks again for your help!

——————————
Oxana Pisareva
The Herschel Supply Company
Vancouver BC
——————————

[Gert Leen]

Hi,

We did implement translated invoices (and other SOP documents) using forms printer. Based on language code on the customer card we print the SOP documents in English, French, German or English. We use an Extender solution holding the item translations, the user can import these translations themselves from Excel

——————————
Gert Leen
Gert Leen Consultancy
————————————————————————-

[Don Pugh]

We had a similar issue with my client that was opening offices in Europe. There was a hosted GP system here in California, that the Europeans accessed via Term server. 

GP 9 was available in multiple languages (French, German, etc)  back in the old days.  It was widely sold in Europe, but when Microsoft purchased NAV, they chose to stop selling and supporting GP in Europe, because NAV was the official product. The backend technology for GP was well designed for multiple languages.  Every string in GP (“Debit”, “Vendor”, etc) has a string number, which the dictionary matched to the corresponding language string.  Just changing the dictionary provided a whole new language interface.  We got the dictionaries for GP9 and upgraded them to GP10, thinking this was a way to go.

We also purchased MultiLingual GP with the idea that the GP screens would all be translated from English to German/French/Italian.  This technology intercepted the display of the screen and did a translation then.  But alas it was disontinued and had limited language support.

When the subsidiary operations were opened in Europe, there was still a number of technology issues with the foreign languages.  But when we talked  with the new financial folks in Europe, they all said no big deal.  To our embarrassment, we discovered they all speak English as well as we do, and did not need translation of the screens.

However for financial reporting in some countries,they needed to have the name of the GL account in the local language.  So we used the alius field to store the local language name.  (Each country had a separate GP database, in the local currency, because of legal issues)

If all you need is just the item description in the local language, then creating a translation table as suggested above would be a good solution.

Don

——————————
Don Pugh
GP Consultant
Sandon Associates
Woodside CA
————————————————————————-

[Beat Bucher]

Hi Oxana,

The sad truth behind the discontinuation fo the GP_multilingual add-in was probably due to its intensive maintenance that was required on each major GP version update..

On thing you need to be aware is that GP out-of-the-box doesn’t support languages like chinese due to the SQL server settings (Unicode or double-byte chars are not supported in GP)

Check this blog post from David Musgrave (former Microsoft Support Engineer).

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/developingfordynamicsgp/2009/02/22/dexterity-and-double-byte-languages/

You might be able to setup your SQL server to support it with a different collation, but beware that it will not be supported by Microsoft and you may run into issues at your next upgrade.

——————————
Beat Bucher
Business Analyst, Dynamics GP MVP
Ultra-Electronics Forensic Technology Inc.
Montreal QC/Canada
+1-514-489-4267
@GP_Beat http://dyngpbeat.wordpress.com/
Montreal QC GPUG Chapter Leader
GP2013R2 / MR2012 CU14
————————————————————————-