Languages
Health apps are mostly written in English for people who read English. Praana is not, and the difference is not only the words: it covers how numbers are written, which second person is polite, and which direction the screen runs.
Two kinds
Hand-checked, and translated on request
Six languages ship as translations a human has read line by line, and those are the ones listed on the App Store.
- Hand-checked
- English, German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Portuguese.
- Also bundled on Android
- Bengali, Marathi, Tamil, Telugu.
- Translated on request
- Everything else in the picker, which holds 89 languages altogether. You pick one, Praana translates the interface once, and it is cached on your device from then on. It shows the download size before you commit and works offline afterwards.
Safety
A translator is not allowed to change a number
This matters more in a health app than in most software. A dose, a lab value, a reference range or a unit that gets rewritten in translation is not a cosmetic bug.
So translations are checked before they are shown. Numbers and units are verified against the original, and a translation that alters one is rejected rather than displayed. The English stays on screen instead, which is the safe failure.
Right to left
Mirrored, not merely translated
Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu run right to left, and that is a layout change rather than a text swap.
Chevrons point the other way, offsets and padding flip, chart axes run the other direction, and gradients reverse. Getting the words right while leaving the arrows pointing the wrong way is the usual half-done version of this, and it reads as broken to anyone who actually uses the language.
Details
The things machine translation usually gets wrong
- Formality
- 48 languages distinguish a polite and a familiar second person. Praana lets you choose, rather than picking one and sounding wrong to half its readers.
- Native digits
- 19 languages can show numbers in their own numerals rather than Western ones, as a setting you control.
- Regional variants
- Where a language differs meaningfully by region, you can pick the variant instead of getting whichever one the model defaulted to.
- Typography
- Line height and spacing adjust per script. Devanagari, Thai and Arabic need more vertical room than Latin, and using one value for all of them clips glyphs.
Reading
A dyslexia mode that is more than one font
Praana has a dedicated accessibility screen rather than a single toggle. Hyperlegible fonts are downloaded on demand, and letter spacing and line spacing are separate controls because they help different readers by different amounts.
There is also a reading scale and a warm background tint, which some readers find reduces the visual noise that makes text swim.
Honest
What this does not claim
- An AI translation is not a professional one. It is checked for safety, not polished for style, and some phrasing will read as stiff.
- If something reads wrong, there is a report button on the translation itself inside the app.
- The six hand-checked languages are the ones to expect natural phrasing from.
- Ara answers in whichever language you have selected, and the same caveat applies to its wording.
The rest of the accessibility picture, including screen readers and contrast, is on accessibility.