Forum Discussion
MichaelMM
Jan 17, 2025Brass Contributor
Change of notification language
Hi everybody,
our tenant was created in Germany. Recently, we migrated another tenant from the US in our tenant. Unfortunately, all American users now receive notifications from Sharepoint Online in German.
I have checked the SP page in question and found out that its default language is German. According to my research notifications are always sent in the default language and that it's not possible to change the default language.
Is there any chance or possibility to change the language of the notifications for this site?
If there is only an option to change them globally to English, this would also be fine.
Thanks for your help.
Just wanted to give a quick follow up on this. Sorry for the delay, but I am still waiting for feedback from the affected user.
I finally was able to change the locale of the private channel's SP page. I wasn't able in the beginning, because I was only member of the channel (not owner) and therefore couldn't see any language settings. However, I now changed the local to English and hope that this solves the issue.
As I said, I'm still waiting for feedback and will let you know.
Thanks!
- MichaelMMBrass Contributor
Thanks for all the information. I will check with the user affected what type of notification it is.
What I found out so far: This notification comes from a list that is saved in a private Teams channel.
I checked all settings you mentioned:
- On the private channel's SP site, there is no setting to change language.
- In the superordinate SP site, the locale is already set to English (USA). Still, the notifications are in German.
Would it help to change the main language in the organization information? MS says:
Preferred language: Determines the language for all communications that are sent from Microsoft to your organization. When you sign up, this setting determines the language used by SharePoint Online, that your users see on your team site. If you change the language preference setting after you sign up, all future communications are sent in the most recent language selected.
Sounds like the solution for my problem, doesn't it?
- MartinLaplanteIron Contributor
It sounds like the solution, and if Microsoft had programmed the "Automate" notifications correctly that might have worked. But it didn't and the site regional settings is the only way to change it.
The regional settings of a subsite are not necessarily the same as top-level site. You would have had to change it in the Teams site before creating the channel. It's a private Teams channel. That complicates things. Those sites are created crippled and are harder to change. I once wrote this post
https://blog.icefire.ca/blogs/post/trick-to-uncripple-teams-private-channel-sites
That might work, it works for some of the crippled aspects, I'm not sure. I tried it in an uncrippled private channel site and I can see the regional settings.
You can also add "_layouts/15/regionalsetng.aspx" to the site URL and go to the site regional settings directly- MichaelMMBrass Contributor
Just wanted to give a quick follow up on this. Sorry for the delay, but I am still waiting for feedback from the affected user.
I finally was able to change the locale of the private channel's SP page. I wasn't able in the beginning, because I was only member of the channel (not owner) and therefore couldn't see any language settings. However, I now changed the local to English and hope that this solves the issue.
As I said, I'm still waiting for feedback and will let you know.
Thanks!
- MartinLaplanteIron Contributor
This is something that you cannot change yourself, but that Microsoft can do for you. You will have to be very clear what notifications you want to change and other behaviour you want to change, like the default language for Teams sites and for new groups, because there are different language parameters including Core language and Preferred language, some of which require drastic action and some do not.
And it used to be pretty drastic. It used to be they had to delete every single site in the tenant and restore them from backup. These days they seem to only delete and re-create the root site. I hope you post a follow-up and tell us how it went.- MichaelMMBrass Contributor
Thanks for the input. I'll check this solution with our MSP.
It should not be changed for every site in our tenant, but only for the migrated US sites.
- ArefHalmstrandSteel Contributor
Hello,
What type of notifications are they? Could you provide some examples?
There are options to add supported languages to a site, and to change preferred language for the user in their browser + user setting in SharePoint. However, as you mentioned, the default language set on a site can not be changed once it is created.- MichaelMMBrass Contributor
Hello,
in this case, it's a notification that an element has been added to a list.
- MartinLaplanteIron Contributor
For list notifications that come from the "Alert me" button dialog, the notification will be in the base language of the site, whatever the language of the user who requested it. There was a time when the notification was in the language of the user at the time, but now only the list name in the notification is in the user's language. However, your notification looks different from the one I get with the "Alert me" button dialog. How did you set up this notification?