Marc-Andre Turmel on 20 Aug 2021 12:10:17
I am developing reports for a coast-to-coast Canadian company and the need to be able to serve reports in both languages (French & English) is a must.
In our previous reports setup (mainly SSRS reports) this was relatively easy to manage, implementing a report parameter that drives label texts and column selections across the report according to the selected language.
I can still use this approach in Paginated reports. But in Power BI interactive reports, which is my main area of focus, this is not easily done at the moment. There are some capabilities, for sure, like metadata translations using Tabular Editor, but this is not a complete multi-language solution.
I've also watched this very nice presentation on ways to provide multi-language capacities to reports:
https://powerbidevcamp.powerappsportals.com/sessions/session12/
While it provides interesting ideas, the overhead involved is unthinkable in my environment where I will likely end up with at least 50 different reports, published through several Power BI apps. Also the multi-language solution proposed in that video for data tweaks the model by adding n-to-n relationships to most dimensions. It complicates the model greatly and decrease performance significantly. My model has at least 30+ dimensions where in SQL/Synapse underlying schema I have different description columns for each supported language. Therefore I think a solution where one can "switch" between a given set of columns based on language would be far easier to maintain than having to pivot everything and loosing the unique key of dimension tables in Power BI tabular model.
Saving a different PBIX file by language is not manageable approach for the number of reports I will be maintaing either. The risk of human error when copying changes over different language files is huge.
On top of the above, there is currently no way to provide multi-language support to the following elements of the Power BI user experience:
- report page titles
- report parameters
- Power BI apps navigation (custom menu sections AND report names in the navigation AND app title)
My only "viable" work-around is to put everything bilingual everywhere, which makes all text much longer, and lead to other challenges around screen estate usage.
I believe this idea could also cover the following ideas I found in my search on multi-language topic here:
https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=c33ab5ef-4403-eb11-b5d9-281878bdaa58
https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=80d69286-efea-4509-9494-162a4e015d13
https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=eca3b93d-ca0b-4bb4-b5d4-83f55bae544a
https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=a61f20df-fba6-4937-9284-0944235663d6
https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=b996bfc2-a5bd-4370-b274-4848d5c3b957
https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=59a1e348-14a4-eb11-89ee-501ac50a7898
https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=4ea1208d-4f5e-4376-a659-bb6a8a2ef4c2
https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=8d9fe139-8d6f-eb11-8fed-281878e608e9
https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=16346d4d-33a9-48eb-8dc5-481f55924f7c
https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=4572279d-7c44-43c5-9315-abf219d3c148
https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=9bd73134-a54e-4041-83ac-575d2a0b17b9
https://ideas.powerbi.com/ideas/idea/?ideaid=e4944d7e-d6fd-ea11-b5d9-281878a5ca29