[ARCHIVED] Change Spanish to English notifications

[dobyrd]

My announcement notifications showing up in my email are in Spanish.  My language preference is correctly set to English.  How can I change it back to English.  I have no idea why this started happening....

[dobyrd · Accepted solution]

Thanks for your replies!  I have checked to see that my language preference is set to English.  I do not teach Spanish.  The Canvas created portion of the announcement is all in Spanish and the announcement I sent as an instructor is English--just as I wrote it.  I am hoping my English speaking students are not receiving the notification in Spanish...  I will use try to contact the folks at instructure to see if they can help.  I can't find anything more than the language setting instructions in the help guides.  

[kona]

 @dobyrd , that’s a super strange problem! If you’ve double checked that your language innCanvas is set to English, then I would contact Canvas Support to see if they can help straighten things out. To do this click on the Help link in Canvas and Report a Problem. 

Hope this helps!

Kona

[James]

Is this for a Spanish class? I am not speaking from experience here, only grasping at whatever I can think of that might cause it. 

There is a setting within the course where instructors can set a language for the course and it will override the user settings for that course. The normal recommendation is that the teacher not set that, but let each student see the menus in the language they want, but some teachers, especially foreign language ones, want the menus to be in the specific language so that the students are immersed. Other teachers don't understand what the setting does and think it's what the teacher is speaking for the course, so they set it to English (or Spanish).

You didn't say if the entire announcement notification was in Spanish. If it's bilingual (part Spanish, part English), then there is something else going on. If it's the generic text and not the actual announcement itself, that's something Canvas is doing. If the surrounding text is English, but the announcement itself is in Spanish, then that's something the teacher (or whoever posted the announcement) did. Canvas will not translate any user text for you, so if it's more than just a generic message about something being due or a file being published or whatever -- if it truly is an announcement -- and it's completely Spanish, then the teacher probably set the language to Spanish for the class and left the announcement in Spanish.

[dobyrd · Accepted solution]

Thanks for your replies!  I have checked to see that my language preference is set to English.  I do not teach Spanish.  The Canvas created portion of the announcement is all in Spanish and the announcement I sent as an instructor is English--just as I wrote it.  I am hoping my English speaking students are not receiving the notification in Spanish...  I will use try to contact the folks at instructure to see if they can help.  I can't find anything more than the language setting instructions in the help guides.  

[kona]

Please let us know what you find out!

[cholling · Accepted solution]

It's odd that  @dobyrd ‌ is having this issue. At our institution, several times some of us have received admin notices of new accounts in Spanish. Odd.

[scottdennis]

Hey Cynthia,

Did you report this behavior to Canvas Support?  If so, what did they say?

[cholling]

I didn't. It hasn't happened consistently, and only by accident did I learn that it had happened to a few others. It's just one of those things that felt like a fluke and not worth wasting people's time on. It wasn't Canvas notifications, but the notification that a new Canvas Dept Admin had been added at our institution.

[cjacobs]

We are encountering this issue at our institution now.  I have verified this issue occurring in several of our subaccounts.  Each user's account preferences are set to English.  Just adding to the conversation in hopes of a fix!

The content and course information is written in English, but the general message text is in Spanish.  This is occurring sporadically across user accounts, courses, and subaccounts.

Thanks!

[dobyrd]

Hello all, 

My university Canvas support finds this to be a mystery.  I am monitoring my other course announcements as I set up my courses and start sending announcements from them.  I will report back in a few days.  Strange!

[scottdennis]

Hey Donyel,

Grasping at pajas here, but...  I noticed that the default language for your institution's instance is not set and so is defaulting to English.  I don't know if it would cut down on the random in-Spanish notifications but maybe your admins should try setting the top level default language to English?

[vsenior]

Did anybody ever find an answer to this question?  We seem to have a faculty with a similar problem.  She is receiving notifications in Spanish.  She teaches music.  As far as I know, this is the first time we have had this come up, but when I checked all the language settings, everything looks normal.  Before I place a case, I just wondered if there was a simple resolution.

[Stef_retired]

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to this thread. We've marked the initial response as the Correct Answer, as this is something that needs to be investigated on a case-by-case basis by a member of Canvas Support. So, if you are still experiencing this and haven't yet initiated a support case, please do so by clicking the Help link of the global navigation and submitting a ticket via the Report a Problem option.

[ahunter]

Just got notifications in Spanish, for the first time. Random!

[scottdennis]

Hi Alison,

I did some digging into this.  I found out that notification messages going out with Spanish user interface is a symptom of what has historically been several root causes.  Because of that it is best to report it to Support each time it happens.  Usually the issue has something to do with a browser or operating system setting on the computer of the person who set the announcement or triggered the notification email to be sent such as the browser_locale browser setting.  All of the incidents I could find also involved the user or institutional language not being explicitly set to English.  Hope that helps you!

[mspeec]

We're having this issue too.  Haven't checked the institutional language setting yet (another admin is working on it), but she did open a ticket with Instructure, who pointed at Zoom as the problem (we've already checked the host's language settings).  I have a ticket open with Zoom to investigate.

[cjacobs]

@mspeec  I hope that provides you a resolution; however, we do not use Zoom at our institution.