How the cleaner app works in 27 languages

British cleaning is not done in English. Walk into any commercial contract of ten people and you will find Polish, Romanian, Portuguese, Bulgarian, Albanian and Punjabi in the same van. That is unremarkable, and it is also the reason so much of this trade still runs on a WhatsApp voice note: text instructions in English get skimmed, half understood, and quietly ignored.

So the cleaner app is translated in full, not partly. All 27 dictionaries are complete. Every button, every section head, every empty state, every error and every confirmation is written in the language the phone is set to, and the whole thing is decided before the cleaner has to find a settings screen.

The 27 languages

This is the list, in the order the picker shows it. It is not alphabetical: English comes first, then the languages a British cleaning team is most likely to need, which is why Polish and Romanian sit above Spanish and German.

It picks the language itself

Nobody has to be told to change a setting. The first time a cleaner opens the app it reads the phone's own list of preferred languages, in the order the phone ranks them, and takes the first one CleanFlo has a dictionary for.

• The region is stripped, so a phone set to pt-BR or pt-PT both get Portuguese, and zh-Hans-CN gets Chinese.
• If nothing on the phone matches, it falls back to English rather than guessing.
• The choice is then written to the phone's own storage, under cleanflo_lang, and used from then on.

An explicit choice always wins and is never overridden afterwards. Somebody who picks English on a Polish phone meant it, and the app will not quietly switch them back next time. Detection only runs when no choice has ever been made.

Where the picker lives

Fifth tab, More, then Settings, under Preferences. The first line is Language. Under it sits Appearance: Automatic, Light or Dark.

09:41

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AO Amara Okafor Coastal Cleans

This phone

Your work Everything is saved Add CleanFlo to this device Free, nothing to download, about ten seconds.

Tell the office

Report something My reports What you have told the office Site survey Walk a building, leave a draft quote

What you are carrying

Equipment 2 items on loan 2 Keys 3 keys 3 My vehicle Ford Transit Connect

Settings Language, notifications, password

Sign Out

Cleans History My time 1 Messages More

1

1. More: their work, what they carry, and Settings.

Tapping that line opens the phone's own picker over the page. All 27 are listed, and the one in use is ticked.

What a translated clean actually looks like

Everything the app writes is translated. Everything you write is not, which is the right way round: a clean called "Weekly clean" stays "Weekly clean", the address stays the address, and a checklist item you typed as "Bins out to the store" reaches the cleaner in the words you chose.

Two things stay in English in every language, deliberately. Dates and clock times are always formatted British style: "Thursday 13 August 2026", "10:41", "2h 30m". A cleaner working in Britain reads British dates on the paperwork, on the door and in the diary, and translating only the app would make the app the odd one out. And property types are your own catalogue values rather than dictionary keys.

The parts of the app most worth translating are the ones nobody thinks about until they go wrong. The sync queue is one of them: somebody who has just done four hours in a basement should be able to read the sentence telling them the work is safe.

Arabic and Urdu read right to left

Two of the 27 are written right to left, and they are the two where getting it wrong is not a cosmetic problem. A left-to-right Arabic interface puts the back arrow, the chevrons and the progress fill on the wrong side of every screen, which makes the app read backwards rather than merely look untidy.

So choosing Arabic or Urdu mirrors the whole cleaner app: the layout, the icons that imply direction, and the edge swipe that pops a clean screen, which flips to the other edge. Your web app is unaffected, because the direction is set on the cleaner app's own root rather than on the page: the two halves share a document and mirroring yours would help nobody.

Your side stays in English

The web app is not translated. Neither are the notifications and emails that come to you when a cleaner does something: "Shift confirmed", "On the way", "Late start", "Clean completed", the availability changes and the time-off requests. That is a decision rather than an omission. The recipient of those messages is you, and the app has no way of knowing what language the owner of a business reads. Everything pointed at a cleaner is translated; everything pointed at the office is in English.

The practical effect is worth stating plainly, because it is the thing that sells this feature. You write a clean once, in English, and it is legible to a Romanian cleaner, a Bulgarian cleaner and a Somali cleaner without you doing anything at all. No parallel rota, no translated instruction sheet pinned in the van, and no relying on whichever member of the team has the best English to relay it.