While your company may have manufacturing facilities and sites all over the world—and they’re all using the same software in production, not everyone speaks English. Fortunately, Inductive Automation’s Ignition features robust support for multilingual translations so that people anywhere can use the software you’ve integrated into your manufacturing processes.

The translation functionality in Ignition works in both the Vision module and the Perspective module, giving you the freedom to use the right modules for your needs across your entire organization.

Tower of Babel - Digital Twin Edition

When a customer told us they would need support for German, French, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese, we realized we would need to implement an automated solution for international translations. Our team built a tool to extract all the text labels from an Ignition project and export them as a CSV file. Then, we sent that list of labels to the customer to translate—while keeping the meanings specific to their process.

Once we had a sample of the German translation to work with, we built another tool to re-import the translated labels using Ignition’s required XML format to bring them into the project.

While we could have used Ignition’s built in Translations Manager, this would have been an entirely manual process. And for a project of this size, manually entering each translation would have been a tedious and time consuming process, especially since the customer required multiple languages. If your project requires extensive multilingual support for your end users or operators, contact us to make it happen. We can implement language translations in Ignition without the time (and expense) of manually rebuilding translation lists one word at a time.

Two gauges in an Ignition Perspective View with German translations for pressure and flow - with labels translated in German

The tool we developed for translations is also part of our Vision to Perspective Conversion Tool. It leverages the functionality we built to map Vision windows into a format we can import into Perspective. It also allows us to extract all the text-based information from every window and exports it to a format that we can use to build the Translation Manager import file with the translated terms.

This means we can rapidly translate your Ignition application—regardless of which module(s) it uses, and that it will only require minutes to generate the translation list. No need to spend hours (or even days) to manually parse each window in your application.

This is an example of yet another unconventional way we use Ignition at Corso Systems to help us work smarter!