Does Bahmni support right-to-left languages, and in specific Arabic? What needs to get done for this?
(Posted on behalf of a community member)
[Oct/2016]
Bahmni EMR is i18n enabled – which means it can be used in different languages. See more here.
Unfortunately, Bahmni doesn’t currently support Arabic or RTL languages. In general, supporting RTL is quite some work. We haven’t currently seen enough demand for this, and also haven’t done a high level estimation study to understand the work needed in Bahmni. So, it isn’t on our immediate roadmap.
Please note that depending on which parts of Bahmni you want to use, you may also be using products like OpenELIS (Lab), and OpenERP (Odoo) for Billing / Pharmacy/ Inventory. OpenELIS also doesn’t support RTL/Arabic, thought it too supports internationalisation. Odoo does seem to support Arabic.
Bahmni is open source. If you would like to help us do an assessment / evaluation of Bahmni suitability for Arabic, and RTL, we would be grateful. Thanks!
By the way you can still register patient names in Arabic and Print the Registration card in Arabic. But Bahmni application itself isn’t yet RTL / Arabic ready.
One of Bahmni’s customers use Bahmni in English, but do register patient names in Arabic. See dummy screensot below:
I have added this to our Product Backlog here: Trello
Please feel free to VOTE for this feature if you would like to see it on our roadmap.
EDIT(Feb-2024): This JIRA ticket will be used to track this work. If you have a comment, please post it here: [BAH-711]: RTL for Bahmni Apps (support for languages like Arabic)
Related discussion on Bahmni in ARABIC and sample PR on how to achieve it:
Related PR by @shilpa, tracking in this JIRA issue: [BAH-1804] - Bahmni - JIRA
A reference community codebase (Annoor hospital in Jordan), that deployed Bahmni, and performed some Arabic translations: Add temporary arabic translations · Bahmni/openmrs-module-bahmniapps@85292b0 · GitHub