Languages and Right-to-Left

Next Exams ships in seven languages, and follows Joomla's own language choice everywhere: the administrator, the management app on the site, the exam pages, emails and certificates.

Language	Joomla tag
English (source)	`en-GB`
German	`de-DE`
French	`fr-FR`
Italian	`it-IT`
Spanish	`es-ES`
Hungarian	`hu-HU`
Arabic (right-to-left)	`ar-AA`

Install the Joomla language first

Next Exams installs its translation for a language only if that language is already installed on the site. This is how Joomla installs every extension's language files: there is nowhere to put a translation for a language the site does not have.

So the order matters:

Install the Joomla language pack: System → Install → Languages, then pick the language.
Install or update Next Exams.

Added a language after Next Exams? Install the same Next Exams package again (it takes Joomla's update route and keeps all your data and settings), and the new language's files are copied in.

Any text without a translation, in a language Next Exams does not ship, shows in English rather than as a raw COM_NEXTEXAMS_… key in the management app.

Which language each person sees

Where	Language
Administrator and the management app	The administrator's own language (their user profile, else the default administrator language)
Exam, runner and result pages	The site language of the page, so a multilingual site serves each visitor their own
Emails	The email template written for the language of the page that sent it (for example the examinee's site language when they hand in), else the template set to All languages — see Notifications
Certificates	The language the certificate template was written in. Template text is your own, so it is never translated

Question and exam content is your own text and is shown as you wrote it. To offer an exam in two languages, create it twice.

Right-to-left (Arabic)

The exam runner with the site in Arabic: the header reads right to left with the exam title and progress on the right, and the first question's options have their buttons on the right, while the question itself, written in English, stays left to right

With Arabic active, the whole product turns right to left:

Administrator and management app: menus, tables, drawers, dialogs and arrows are mirrored. Pictures you draw on (hotspot areas, image marking, graphs, the range scale and puzzles) and charts keep left to right, because their positions belong to the picture, not to the reading direction.
Exam pages: the runner and result pages follow the direction of your site template (<html dir="rtl">, which Joomla sets for an RTL language). Numbers and coordinates inside a sentence keep their order, so -6 is never shown as 6-.
The editor gets right-to-left direction and the editor's own Arabic interface when your site has it.
Question content follows the text itself: a question written in Arabic reads right to left, one written in English left to right, even on the same page.

Certificates in Arabic

Arabic text in a certificate is joined into its proper letter shapes and put in reading order when the PDF is made. It is always printed in DejaVu Sans, whatever font the text block names, because the other bundled faces have no Arabic letters. Certificates issued before you switched to Arabic benefit too: the shaping happens each time the PDF is made, not when the certificate is stored.

Known limit: an Arabic paragraph long enough to wrap onto a second line prints its lines in the wrong order. Keep Arabic certificate text to one line per text block, as certificate text usually is.

Your own wording

Every interface string can be changed with Joomla's Language Overrides (System → Manage → Language Overrides). Search for the English text and override the key for your language: in the Administrator client for the management app (it uses those overrides on the site too), in the Site client for the exam pages. Overrides survive Next Exams updates.