Alternate Language Variants

In order to accommodate volunteers who speak different languages, VSys lets you set up specific letter templates for people who speak different languages. In the example below, this letter template is defined for use by French speakers.

This by itself is not that useful - when doing mail merges, you'd have to do one mail merge for English speakers, then another for French speakers. VSys can help you there, too. Always do the merges with your primary (in this example "Award") template, regardless of the language of the recipients. By setting the field Alternate-language versions for merges above, when VSys does a mail merge with the "Award" template, VSys can try to find the best letter template for each recipient.

Steps in this task

1. For each letter template, specify the languages it's applicable for.
2. When that letter needs to be sent to people in different languages, define alternate-language versions of the same letter, and set their statuses to Active or Alternate language.
3. Within the primary template, set the other templates as alternate-language versions.

For the "Awards" example, we set Alternate-language versions for merges to "Award (French)". If there were Spanish and Portuguese awards letters, we'd specify those here as well.

When VSys is asked to merge a letter template with a person, it looks for an appropriate template based on these rules, then stops when it finds a match:

1. Selected template for the person's communication language, if present, or
2. Alternate-language templates for that communication language, or
3. Selected template for the person's primary language, or
4. Alternate-language templates for the primary language, or
5. Selected template for the person's other languages, or
6. Alternate-language templates for the person's other language.

If none of these match, VSys will use the original template that you selected.