Description
System generated activity/log messages (e.g., status changes, assignments, due date changes, approval requests) are displayed in the language of the user who triggered the action (“actor language”) for all users viewing the task. This causes mixed-language activity feeds in multilingual teams: Spanish actions show Spanish logs to English users, and English actions show English logs to Spanish users. Manually entered comments remain in the language they were typed, which is expected.
Steps to Recreate
- Set User A’s language preference to Spanish.
- Set User B’s language preference to English.
- User A changes a task status (or any action that generates a system log entry).
- View the task activity/comments log as User A and as User B.
- User B changes the task status.
- View the task activity/comments log again as User A and as User B.
Expected Result
• Each viewer sees system generated log entries in their own selected language (e.g., User A sees Spanish; User B sees English).
• Manually entered comments remain in the language they were entered.
Actual Result
• System-generated log entries display in the actor’s language for everyone:
- If User A (Spanish) triggers the action, the log entry appears in Spanish for both User A and User B (e.g., “Se cambió el estado de esta tarea…”).
- If User B (English) triggers the action, the log entry appears in English for both User B and User A.
• Manually entered comments remain in the language they were typed (works as expected).
Impact
• Shared task history becomes inconsistent and harder to understand for multilingual teams.
• Users may miss important status/activity changes due to language mismatch.
• Reduces usability of the activity log as an audit trail across mixed-language teams.
Scope / Frequency
Occurs 100% of the time for system generated messages in task activity/comments logs when users have different language preferences.
Environment
• Web app
• Task activity/comments log
• All system generated audit/log messages (status change, assignment, due date change, approval request, etc.)
Technical Clues (Optional)
System message text appears to be generated/stored at creation time using the actor’s locale, rather than being rendered dynamically per viewer locale.
Proposed Fix (Optional)
Store system log events as structured data (event type + parameters) and render the localized message at display time based on the viewing user’s language preference (with a fallback to English if a translation key is missing).
Workarounds
None (other than standardizing all users to a single language).
