Languages

Languages, time zones and date formats: for the workspace, for each member of staff, and for each customer.

Zenta CRM ships in English, Spanish, French, German and Portuguese, all complete. Everything about language, time and dates is on one screen: Settings → Localization. Each member of staff can then choose their own language and time zone, and each customer gets documents in theirs.

The screen has three cards — Language and time zone, Dates and times and Languages on offer — saved together with Save changes at the foot.

The workspace language and time zone

Workspace language is what the application is in for anybody who has not chosen a language of their own, and what every customer without a language of their own receives. Time zone is where your business keeps its clock. Under the field you can see the current time in the zone you picked, so a wrong choice is obvious before you save.

Date and time formats

Pick a date format (for example 11/09/2026, 09/11/2026, 2026-09-11 or 11 Sep 2026) and a time format, 24-hour or 12-hour. Each option shows today written that way, and the Today reads as line under them shows the pair together as you change them.

The formats apply everywhere a date is shown: lists, record pages, the portal, the public payment page, PDFs and the dates filled into email templates. Month names follow the reader's language, so 11 Sep 2026 reads 11 sep. 2026 to a Spanish reader. Date boxes in forms keep the browser's own date picker.

First day of the week and the weekend

First day of the week (Monday, Saturday or Sunday) decides where each row of the calendar starts. Weekend days are the days nobody works: the calendar greys them, and leave requests do not count them.

Which languages are on offer

The Languages on offer table lists every language installed in the lang/ folder, with a switch for each. Only the languages switched on can be chosen by staff for themselves or given to a customer. Turn off a translation you have not finished, or one for a market you do not serve.

• The workspace language is always on; its switch is locked.
• Until you save this table the first time, every installed language is on, so an upgrade does not hide a language somebody already uses.
• A member of staff or a customer whose language you turn off is not changed. They get the workspace language until you turn it back on.

Your own language and time zone

Every member of staff can choose for themselves: open the menu under your name at the top right and choose My account.

1. Choose a Language, or leave it on Workspace default to follow the workspace.
2. Choose a Time zone, or leave it on Workspace default.
3. Press Save changes. The page reloads in your language.

This affects only you. A colleague in Madrid can read the application in Spanish while one in Dhaka sees every time in Dhaka time, in the same workspace. Reminder emails sent to you (a task coming due, a contract you manage that is expiring) use your language too.

A customer's language

On the customer form, Language sets the language that customer reads. Leave it on Workspace default to use the workspace language. It decides:

• The client portal their contacts sign in to.
• PDFs of their invoices, estimates, proposals and credit notes, whether you download one, email it from the list, bundle it into a zip, or they download it from the portal. The printed headings (Invoice, Due date, Subtotal…), month names and text direction all follow.
• Emails that go to them: the covering message when you email documents from a list, and the automatic reminders (invoice due and overdue, estimate expiring, contract awaiting signature). The template text is yours and stays as you wrote it; the dates filled into it and any wording around it follow the customer's language.

If you switch off a language a customer already has, the customer keeps it on their record (the form shows it as not offered) and receives the workspace language until you switch it back on.

Right to left

The layout follows the language each person is reading. A member of staff who chose Arabic, Hebrew, Farsi or Urdu gets a right-to-left layout, and so does a portal contact whose company has one of those languages. Everybody else in the same workspace keeps left-to-right. PDFs and emails follow the language they are written in, so an Arabic customer's invoice is laid out right to left.

Always lay pages out right to left, at the bottom of the languages table, forces right-to-left for every language. The table's Direction column says which way each installed language reads. You do not need it for the languages above; it is there for a translation Zenta CRM does not recognise as right-to-left.

Adding your own language

The strings live in lang/ as JSON, one file per language.

Strings with a | in them have a singular and a plural form: ":count day|:count days". Keep both halves and the bar between them, in that order.

After you edit a view

Run the extract command again. Strings already translated keep their translations; only new ones are added, seeded with the English so they are easy to spot. Add --prune to drop strings no longer used anywhere.

Sign-in and password messages

A handful of messages — a rejected login, a password reset — come from Laravel's own files rather than the JSON. Copy lang/es/auth.php and lang/es/passwords.php to a folder named for your language and translate those too. Do not put keys like auth.failed into the JSON file: a JSON translation takes priority over a PHP one, and the result is the literal text "auth.failed" shown to somebody who mistyped their password.

What is not translated

• Your own content. Customer names, invoice line descriptions, notes, terms, knowledge-base articles and email templates are your words, and are stored once.
• Currency follows each document's own currency, as it should: a French customer invoiced in dollars is invoiced in dollars.

Addresses on this page

For reference and for anyone scripting against the panel. Everything here needs somebody signed in to the workspace whose role allows it; anybody else is refused.