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Swiss HR Easy ships in German, French and English. Every user picks their locale; the default for an installation is set with NEXT_PUBLIC_DEFAULT_LOCALE. There are two distinct kinds of translatable text, and they work differently.

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1. UI chrome

Buttons, table headers, validation messages, menu labels — everything the product itself says. These live in message files (src/messages/de.json, fr.json, en.json) and are shipped with the product. Users do not edit them. All three files carry the same key tree, enforced in CI. A key present in German but missing in French is a runtime error for French users, so it fails the build rather than reaching production.

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2. Authored content

Anything a person reads that your organization wrote. This is edited in the product, per locale, by HR:

E-mail templates

Pipeline stage mails, onboarding invitations, probation questionnaires, payslip dispatch.

Job ads

The public posting per locale, plus the SECO Job-Room submission.

Portal messages

Notifications and instructions shown to applicants and employees.

Pipeline stage instructions

What the stage asks the applicant or the hiring team to do.

Offer letters and contracts

Generated documents and their templates.

Survey and feedback questions

Question text and scale labels.
Authored content is stored in per-locale fields — field, fieldEn, fieldFr — so a record carries all three versions at once. Each of these surfaces ships with a shared Translate action that drafts the other locales from the one you wrote, which you then review and edit before it goes out.
A single-locale communication surface is not acceptable. If a new feature sends an applicant or an employee something they read, it must be authorable in all three languages.

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Which language a person receives

Outbound communication uses the recipient’s locale, not the sender’s. An HR staffer working in German who sends a stage e-mail to a French-speaking applicant sends the French version. Where a dispatch is recorded (probation questionnaires, payslip mails), the wording actually used is snapshotted on the dispatch row, so the record shows what the person received rather than what the template says today.

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Formats

Locale affects more than words:
  • Dates follow the locale convention (31.12.2026 in de/fr).
  • Currency is CHF throughout, formatted per locale.
  • Numbers use the locale’s separators — this matters on payroll exports.

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For developers

Use useTranslations('namespace') in client components and getTranslations in server components; namespace keys as module.section.key. Never hardcode a German, French or English string in JSX or in a service return value that reaches the UI — including error messages. The full rule set is in Internationalization.