Translating a program
Translate a whole program into another language in one action, including its phases, content collections, workouts and nutrition templates.
Translating a program rewrites its content in the language you pick. It covers the program name, description and goals, every phase and day, your content collections, and every workout and nutrition template the program uses.
How to run it
- Open the program and go to its Settings tab.
- Find the Language row and choose Translate program.
- In Translate this program, pick the language under Translate into.
- Optionally use Extra instructions, for example “use the informal register” or “leave exercise names in English”.
- Choose Translate.
The program is locked while the translation runs, and a progress panel shows each piece as it is finished, with a Cancel translation button. You can leave the screen: the work continues, and reopening the program shows where it got to.
What it changes, and how to undo it
Translation replaces the existing text, it does not keep a second language alongside it. So duplicate the program first if you want to keep the original language. See Duplicating a plan.
Before the first change to any workout or nutrition template, Protocol saves a restore point, and each of those can be put back one at a time: open the workout or the nutrition template and use its History. Restoring is per template, so a whole program is not one click away from its old language.
It reaches inside embedded content, which is where most of a program’s substance lives:
- Menus built inside a content collection. A meal saved directly into a collection, rather than picked from your nutrition library, carries its recipe with it. The name, the ingredient list and the method are all translated.
- Documents and lessons. The title and the whole written body of a document in a content collection are translated, so a client reading “How to navigate your meal plan” reads it in their own language.
A few things stay in the original language on purpose:
- Measurement labels on foods, such as “1 medium fillet”. These are tied to the nutrition calculations, so a translated portion shows a translated food name with the original measure.
- Rep schemes, tempo, RPE and RIR, which are values rather than words.
- Your exercise library, and your media library. Exercise names and document titles inside the program are translated; the libraries themselves are untouched, because the copies inside the program are separate from them.
- Uploaded file names, such as
plan_v2.jpg. A file name is not a title. - Anything in curly braces, like
{{clientFirstName}}. These placeholders are left exactly as written; if a translation would have changed one, that piece of text is left in the original language instead.
Where the button is unavailable
Translate program greys out in two cases, and says which one it is:
- The program follows a template. Its content lives on the template and is shared with everyone else assigned to it, so one action never re-languages several clients’ programs at once. Unlink the program first, or translate the template itself when you do want everyone on it to move language. See Assigning a plan to a client.
- The program is read-only, which is every plan on the Protocol tabs. Use Import to my library first, then translate your own copy.
If it can’t finish
If the AI provider is unavailable, the job still completes, but it reports zero items translated and lists what it skipped. It does not save a restore point in that case, because nothing changed, and it never reports success for a translation that didn’t happen. Run it again once the provider is back.
What it costs
Translation uses your AI credits, and it appears on your billing page under Translation. A large program with many workouts and nutrition templates uses more credits than a short one.