Katalon – Multilingual Support

Purpose

Katalon supports multiple languages on three levels:

Labels (field names, subtypes, form variants, vocabulary terms) – a separate text per language.
Translatable field values – a field (e.g. “Description”) can hold a German and an English text.
Portal interface – the public catalog has a language switcher.

The configurable languages apply globally to the whole instance, not per field.

Under Settings → Languages the list of supported languages is maintained (ISO 639-1 codes, comma-separated, e.g. de, en, fr).

First language = primary language. It is the fallback language: if a text is missing in the displayed language, the primary language is used instead.
Changes take effect immediately on all label input fields (schema, subtypes, vocabularies, form variants) and on the translation form.
Default: de, en.

Maintaining labels in multiple languages

Everywhere labels are maintained, one input field per configured language appears:

Schema (field definitions): “Label DE”, “Label EN”, …
Subtypes
Form variants (display name)
Vocabularies (term label, plus inverse direction for relation types)

There are no more hard-wired “DE/EN-only” fields; the number of input fields follows the language list.

Translatable field values (“Description” in DE and EN)

Marking a field as translatable

In the schema editor, text and rich-text fields (non-repeatable) have the “Multilingual” checkbox.

Only these field types are translatable:

Translatable	Not translatable
Text, Rich text	Relation, Date, Number, Boolean, Vocabulary, Authority data, PID, Container fields
–	Repeatable fields

For other field types, the editor shows the notice: “This field type is not translatable (text/rich-text only, non-repeatable).”

Entering values

In the record form, a translatable field first shows only the primary language:

DE  [German description………………………………]  [+ EN]

+ EN (or + FR, …) reveals the input for additional languages.
The placeholder shows the label in the respective language (e.g. “Description”).
Already-filled languages remain visible; each added language has an × to remove it.

One object per language is stored, e.g. {"de": "Deutsche Beschreibung", "en": "English description"}.

AI-assisted translation

When AI assistance is enabled, Katalon can generate a translation proposal for a single translatable field from the already entered primary language into a missing target language.

In the schema editor, in addition to “Multilingual”, the field must also have “Enable AI-assisted translation” turned on — configurable per field.
In the form, the translate trigger next to the respective language opens a dialog showing the current source-language value and the AI suggestion side by side. The suggestion can be freely edited before it is applied.
Requirement: AI assistance is enabled globally, and both source and target language are among the instance’s configured languages.
Every applied AI translation is logged in the audit log (see Audit Log).

Portal display

The public catalog shows translatable content in the active language with fallback:

Language selection order: URL parameter ?lang= → saved choice → browser language → primary language.
The language switcher sits at the top right of the header.
If a text is missing in the active language, Katalon falls back to primary language → German → first available language.
Vocabulary terms in fields of type Vocabulary also show the label in the active language on the detail page instead of a fixed default label.

Adding a new language

Admin → Settings → Languages: add the language code (e.g. de, en, fr).
Portal translations: In the source code, copy frontend/portal/src/i18n/locales/en.ts to fr.ts, translate the values, and register it in i18n/index.ts.

Afterwards the label input fields and the portal switcher automatically appear in the new language.

Limitations

Repeatable fields and structured field types (Relation, Date, Number, …) are deliberately not translatable – they are language-independent.
Primary field title/name (page title, search hits, cards) is not translated; it is designed as a unique display name, not as multilingual content.
Search index: full-text search currently indexes all language variants together; language-specific analyzers are not implemented.
CSV importer: the column mapping (label:de/label:en) remains limited to German/English.