Multilanguages Support - capture name in both local language and English

Question

I have installed CiviCRM on WordPress. What I try to do is to have different fields to store both Chinese and English names of donors, and another field to store their preference on which language to use in communications.

Following the Sys Admin Guide, I was able to install Chinese support on top of US English and activate the Multiple Languages Support option. I can switch between Chinese and English in the UI, but I couldn't find how custom fields can be created to store Chinese names and language preferences.

Can anybody shed some light?

Answer 1

You can set preferred language for a contact under Communications Preferences on the main tab on the contact page.

You can create custom fields to store Chinese or English names and use the regular name fields for the other language (Administer - Customize Data and Screens - Custom Fields). But it's going to be more complicated if you want to use those names in mailings depending on language setting or otherwise choose the names to use in a specific situation based on the language setting. It might help to provide some more detail on what you want to do with the names specifically.