Atlassian – We Need Separate Language Settings

[#1]

🧩 The challenge

I’m Norwegian and work in a large company where Norwegian is the primary working language. Yet in Atlassian tools, I’ve set my profile language to English. Why?

Because menus, buttons, and interface elements just make more sense in English. It’s the language we see in Atlassian documentation, support articles, training videos – basically all help resources.

Unfortunately, Atlassian only provides a single language setting, which controls everything – both the interface and how language-sensitive features behave.

🎯 Examples of the issue

When using English as the display language, I also get:

• 🧠 Summaries of Confluence pages written in Norwegian – but the summary appears in English.
   

• 💬 “Define terms” (AI definitions) – shows explanations in English even when the term is Norwegian.
  
  

  
  
  

• ⚡ Smart replies in Jira – canned comments in English. They made so little sense in our context, we actually filed a support ticket to have the feature removed.
  
  

• 📄 Confluence page templates – shown in English, even when our team is writing in Norwegian.

These are just a few examples – and I suspect other teams working in German, French, Spanish, Japanese etc. run into the same issue.

❓Why not just use Norwegian?

We tried. But the UI translations feel unfamiliar and less intuitive. The terminology differs from what users are used to. So we switched back to English – and in doing so, lost access to functionality that assumes I want the content in English.

💡 The feature request

Please consider splitting the language setting into two:

• Display language – for menus, buttons, and interface

• Content/authoring language – for features like summaries, templates, suggestions, definitions, etc.

📷 Here’s how Microsoft Office handles this – and it works really well

This would let users combine a familiar, efficient UI with smart features that respect the language they're actually working in.

✅ Want this too?

I've created a feature request for this exact improvement. If you agree, please vote and leave a comment here:

👉 [ID-9009] To introduce multi-language settings in Atlassian account.