"Rename Tabs and Labels": German Translation overrides Object Definition

Question

I can't find any similar issue online and it is making me crazy.

I need to have translations for a Custom Object tab in English and German.

I first adjust the Name for English (let's say I just call the Object "eng" in both singular and plural) and save. Then switch the Selected Language to "German" and fill in the translations (for example "ger" for all Grammar types) and save. My Users language is "English", so I should see the object as "eng" in Tabs. In the "All Tabs" view, this is working fine. If my language is English, I see "eng", when I change it to German then it is "ger".

But when going into Object Manager in Setup and looking for the object there it is somehow named "ger", even though I changed my language back to English. The Objects singular and plular label got changed to the German translation. Now when I change it back to normal and save, the German translation is not working anymore.

When going back into "Rename Tabs and Labels" and checking the German translation, the translations for "Nominative" are both changed to what I adjusted in the Object Definition.

So in short: for some reason the German Tab translations and the actual Object Definitions/Labels are in sync with one another. This is bad because an English Administrator could have troubles finding Objects in Setup which are suddenly German. I tried this on multiple orgs and this issue occurs in each and every one of them.

Also this does not work with other languages, for example if I change the name for Japanese or French, the actual object definition stays untouched, but German overrides everything for some reason.

What I have tried already:

• using different browsers
• using different orgs
• using different languages
• creating a test Custom Object
• changing the default Language & Locale in Company Information
• using Classic / Lightning
• Translation Workbench doesn't seem to support the translation of Object Labels

Nothing seems to fix this annoying issue, and I am honestly surprised that I cannot find a similar issue anywhere. How can I get these translations to work? I would gladly appreciate any help I could get on this. Thank you in advance.

Answer 1

Had a discussion about this with Salesforce support and... "it's not a bug, it's a bit of an undocumented feature".

It boils down to org default language - for me it was Finnish, and that the tabs really don't seem to have a default value, unlike e.g. picklist values or custom field labels do.

Apparently the catch here is that while we set the tab name as X while creating it - even if the UI language is English - when we then create the translation as Y, for me Finnish, that will become the default, if default is not set separately.

What worked for me as a workaround is to create the tab, set the name to X, then proceed to the Rename Tabs and Labels section, create an "English translation" by "renaming" the tab as X - and only then proceeding with the Finnish translation. When there is already an English "translation", it will not be overwritten with the default.

Hope it helps.