Renaming or duplicating products must be done carefully in multilingual databases

Many users are surprise the first time they start using OpenERP in a multilingual database. One area where there are many surprises is the renaming or duplication of products.

When you are in a multilingual database, every translatable field has multiple values, one for each language. The value that is displayed by default in all views depends on the language you have currently selected in the user preferences. And if you modify a value, only the translation for your current language is modified.

You may access the translations in other languages via the little flag icon that is displayed on the right of all translatable fields.

You need to be particularly careful when duplicating or renaming products, because if you only change one translation, the other translations will still have the old values. It happens more often with products, but this is in fact true for all translatable fields, like account names, stock locations names, etc.

A a final note, it is important to know that OpenERP always searches in 2 languages: the current language and the default english language. You may thus see mixed results when you are searching on a translatable field, but this will also help you catch the errors described above more easily. See also FAQ #1691