Every language, read by someone who reads it

September 12, 2026 · Abdulkareem H. Ali

Tawaasal has shipped in [eleven languages](/en/blog/tawaasal-now-speaks-11-languages) since May. Every one of those languages passed every check we had: each of the roughly 12,800 strings in English had a matching string in German, Turkish, Hindi and the rest. Nothing was missing.

Nothing was missing, and quite a lot was wrong. A check that compares keys cannot tell you that the German word chosen for a pupil's parent was Wächter — a watchman — in 67 places, while 134 other screens used the right word. It cannot tell you that "Parents Evening" had been rendered faithfully, word for word, into five languages as an evening for parents, which is not what the thing is called in any of them. And it cannot tell you that Arabic described a record that is switched on with the word for a lively child.

The only thing that catches this is a person who reads the language, looking at the actual screen. So that is what this release is: every one of the eleven languages, read by someone who reads it, on the pages a school actually sees.

What "read" means

Not the translation files. A reader shown a spreadsheet of English on the left and Turkish on the right will judge whether the Turkish is a good translation of the English, and that is the wrong question. The right question is whether a Turkish school would have written this. So each reader was shown rendered screens — the timetable, a safeguarding concern, a leave request, an invoice, the emails and push notifications — with realistic names, subjects and classes in that language, and asked one thing: does this sound like a school wrote it, or like a translation?

Every finding needed two readers to agree before anything changed. One reader's opinion is a note; two readers' agreement is a fix. And nothing was fixed by find-and-replace. The English word "active" names two different things — a switch that is on, and a pupil who takes part — and a language that has two words for those needs both, in the right places. Each occurrence was judged by the concept it stood for, not the word it happened to share.

Arabic, one screen at a time

Arabic is the language we read natively, so it got the fullest treatment: every term that changed was shown on the rendered screen and decided there. What we found was not mistranslation. It was that one idea wore a different word on almost every screen. The class group, the year group and the academic term had been sharing a single word between them. The record staff raise when they fear a child is at risk had been named with the word for a passing worry. The file holding a pupil's medical and SEN information had been named with the word for comfort, in two different ways depending on the page.

Thirty-two decisions and 429 rewritten values later, one concept has one word, and every choice is written down with who read it and why.

British English, throughout

The product's vocabulary was always British — safeguarding, SEN, term, marks, Pupil Premium — but the spelling underneath it was mostly American, so a school could read enrollment on one screen and enrolment on the next. That is settled now: colour, behaviour, authorise, enrol, throughout.

The words you receive, not just the words you see

A screen you can read is half of it. The other half arrives in your inbox and on your phone.

Forty kinds of notification — merit points, fee reminders, attendance nudges, report-ready notices, data exports — used to send an English sentence to every recipient whatever language they had chosen. Now each one is written in all eleven languages and resolved per person. Where a child and an adult read the same event, the child is addressed as a child and the parent as a parent, and a parent is no longer told their child's name twice in the same line.

The emails you get when you are least able to cope with the wrong language — verify your address, reset your password — were being composed in English regardless of your settings. They are now in your language, from a template your school can edit.

Documents in your language, that actually print

A report card, a receipt or a safeguarding export used to come out in whatever language the first person to open it had chosen — so an English-reading administrator previewing a card decided what an Arabic-reading family received. Each document now renders in the language of whoever downloads it.

And it renders. A Hindi or Japanese document had been coming out as a page of colons and digits, because the document engine carried no font that could draw those scripts, and a missing glyph draws nothing at all — not even a box. Hindi was being drawn without shaping, so vowel signs landed on the wrong side of their consonants. Urdu and Persian were losing the last letter of words. Arabic dates on invoices printed backwards, letters unjoined. German column headings broke mid-word because every column had been sized for the English. All of it is fixed, and every fix is checked by a test that walks all eleven languages, so the next edit that outgrows a column fails in the repository rather than in a parent's inbox.

What we deliberately did not decide

Honesty about the limits. For languages where we do not yet have a school — Japanese, Turkish, Portuguese, Persian, Hindi among them — the readers left a set of judgement calls we chose not to make on their behalf. Does a Turkish school call a merit point takdir puanı or artı puan? Which Spanish? Deciding that today means guessing, and the moment a school in that language joins is the moment the right person to ask finally exists. Those questions are written down, with the readers' recommendations, waiting for them.

Every language now has a dated record of who read it, what they found, what was changed and what was left. If your school reads in one of those languages and you spot something a school would never have written, [we would genuinely like to hear it](/en/contact) — you are the reader we could not get.