Read time: 7.5 minutes

Imagine this…

You’ve just moved to a new country and it’s your first day at your new job.

You’ve got your café noisette ☕ and your brand-new Workday login. It’s official, you’re a cultured expat ready to be an international rockstar 🤘

You do the responsible thing. You set your preferred language and start your onboarding tasks. But Workday hits you with a plot twist.

Random buttons, labels, and even a few task instructions still show up in the wrong language!

This isn’t just a hypothetical — it could be happening to your workforce right now.

In this newsletter, we teach you exactly how to prevent this experience: how to set up Tenanted Translation Projects and load your custom translations via EIB.

Let's go 🦄

Before we get into the fix, here's the landscape.

As of this publish date, Workday fully translates 11 core UI languages and supports 39 languages.

What’s the difference?

A language is considered ‘Workday supported’ when Workday delivers a translation of that language for parts of its own UI, module by module. It’s not the whole shebang like it is with the 11.

But even though Workday offers full or partial translations for a language, that doesn’t mean you’re off the hook.

Your tenanted data — your org-specific data living in your tenant — still needs to be translated. Think: notifications, business process help text, templates, labels, org names, alerts, knowledge articles, and more 🤔

In short, Workday might translate Workday — but you still have to translate you.

How big? As big as the AI hype machine 🤖

Every single one of those tenant-specific values is its own translation task. Multiply that by however many languages you support. And, yeah.

On top of that, to make sure you’re really making an impact with this work, you need to validate end-to-end how each component reads in your target languages — otherwise you risk support tickets, confused employees, and a rollout that reads as out-of-touch.

If this is such a major undertaking, why bother?

For the good of your global employees, of course!

A lack of translations leads to confusion and friction for them in their everyday. It’s a signal that your workplace wasn't built with them in mind. Adoption slows, and confidence drops.

So, while you’re not going to “finish translations” in a day or even a week, we still believe that for the sake of good culture and unblocking your employees, it’s worth it!

You just need a way to eat this elephant one bite at a time a little more efficiently than task by task.

A Tenanted Translation Project (or “TTP”… we’re creating a new acronym to save words! 😜) helps you organize and manage translating your tenant-specific values through an EIB.

Yes, you can translate some values manually, but at any real scale, EIB wins: it’s faster, more consistent, and easier to validate/reload when you hit errors.