Will my own room names be translated when I share a drawing?
A floor plan's fixed words, such as "Kitchen" or "Width", can be pre-translated by a program. But if you type your own name into a room, such as "Dad's Study" or "Utility Room", that is an entirely different task to translate, and most apps cannot do it.
Short answer: No, not by default. A room's standard type, "Kitchen", "Bedroom", is chosen from a list and can therefore be pre-translated once and for all. But if you type your own name in, "Dad's Study", "Guest Toilet in the Basement", there is no list to look it up in. That requires a program with a translation function for free text, and only a handful of apps have one. Without it, your own word stays exactly as you wrote it, no matter which language the rest of the drawing is shown in.
Two kinds of text on a floor plan — and why they behave differently
A floor plan carries two layers of text, and they come into being in different ways. One layer is the programme's own fixed words: room types chosen from a list, column headings in a schedule, legends for the symbols. There is a limited number of these, so someone can translate them once, in advance, into every language the app supports.
The other layer is what you type yourself: a name for a room, a note beside a piece of furniture, a comment in the margin. That kind of text is unlimited — there is no list of every word a person might use for their utility room. Translating it properly needs a real translation engine that understands language, not just a lookup table.
The difference is not cosmetic. It decides whether the feature can be built cheaply and quickly at all, or whether it needs something more — and that is why many apps only ever solve the first half.
Does the translation run on the phone or in the cloud?
Both exist in practice, and the difference matters for what the app asks of you:
- Cloud-based translation sends the text to a server, gets a reply back and shows it. It works without any setup, but it needs an internet connection every single time, and the text leaves the phone — for a note like "key box code is in the shed", that is not a trivial detail.
- On-device translation uses a language model that lives downloaded on the phone. The first time, a language pack has to be fetched — typically a few hundred megabytes per language — but after that, translation works without the internet, and the text never leaves the phone.
Neither approach is perfect. Cloud translation is often a little better with unusual words, because it draws on a larger model. On-device translation is slower to set up the first time, but more robust when you are standing in a house with no signal, and more discreet with the content.
What if a word cannot be translated?
It happens — compound words, pet names, typos, or words used in a sense the translation engine does not know. There is one important rule here, whichever program you use: a word that cannot be translated should be left untouched in the original language — never guessed into something else. A poor translator fills the gap with a guess that reads smoothly but means the wrong thing. That is worse than no translation at all, because you cannot see that anything went wrong.
Test it yourself before you trust the feature: type a room name with a compound or unusual word, translate the drawing, and check whether the result makes sense in the other language. If it reads oddly, it is probably because the engine guessed instead of honestly giving up.
Why it is not just "run Google Translate over the whole thing"
You might think the fix is to send the whole PDF through a translation service afterwards. The problem is that a floor plan is not running text — it is labels sitting at fixed positions next to lines and figures. A general translation tool cannot tell a room name from a measurement, and may well "translate" a number, or shift the text so it no longer lines up with the line it belonged to. For translation to work reliably on a drawing, the program has to know exactly which text fields are your own words, and touch only those.
How to get the most out of the feature, whichever app you use
- Keep room names simple. "Study" translates better than "Dad's old workroom with the crooked shelves" — the more you write, the more there is that can go wrong.
- Download the language pack in good time, if the translation runs on the phone. It generally needs fetching before you are standing without a signal and need it right away.
- Check the result before you pass it on. Even a good translator can trip over a single word — it is cheaper to catch it yourself than to have the recipient catch it for you.
- Keep a version in the original language alongside it, if the drawing matters. Then you have something to compare against if a translation looks suspect.
What HouseSense does
In HouseSense, your own room names are translated on the phone itself, not in the cloud — the text never leaves the device. The first time, a language pack has to be fetched from the report sheet ("Download language pack for your own text"), and after that, the names are translated along with the rest of the PDF whenever you choose an export language. If a word cannot be translated, it is left exactly as written in the original language — nothing is ever guessed. The app's fixed text — room types, schedule headings and the like — is a separate mechanism: pre-translated text in 13 languages, independent of whether the language pack for your own words has been downloaded.
When it is not worth worrying about
If you only use the standard names — Kitchen, Bathroom, Living Room — this whole question does not apply: that kind of word is always covered, because it is chosen from a list, not typed freely. It is only once you start writing your own names and notes that the difference between the two translation layers becomes visible. And if the drawing is only ever used by you, internally, it is not an issue either — it only matters once the drawing leaves the house for someone with a different language, whether your own words came along for the ride.