Translate email templates (invitation, password reset) to match UI languages

[waffii]

Summary

The Pangolin web UI supports 14 languages including German, French, Spanish, Italian, Polish, etc. However, all emails sent by Pangolin (invitations, password resets, notifications) are currently hardcoded in English only — even when the recipient or the organization has selected a different UI language.

Motivation

This creates an inconsistent user experience: A self-hoster sets the entire dashboard to German for their team, but invitation emails still arrive in English. For non-English speakers, this is confusing and feels unprofessional.

Example of the current invitation email a German user receives:

Hi there,
You've been invited to join {Organization} by {Inviter}. Click the button below to accept your invitation and get started.
[Accept Invitation]
This invite expires in 3 days.

The translation infrastructure already exists in the project for the UI, so it would be natural to extend it to email content.

Proposed Solution

1. Extract email subjects and bodies into i18n message files alongside the existing UI translations.

2. Determine email language by (in priority order):

   • The recipient's user profile language (if existing user)
   • The organization's default language
   • A server-wide default (configurable via config.yml)

3. Optionally allow self-hosters to override templates via volume mount or config option for fully custom branding/wording.

Affected emails

• Invitation email
• Password reset email
• Account verification email (if applicable)
• Any future notification emails (alerts, expiry reminders, etc.)

Environment

• Pangolin version: v1.18.3
• Self-hosted: yes
• UI language tested: Deutsch (German)

Thanks for the great work on Pangolin — happy to help test translations once the framework is in place!

Alternatives Considered

Workarounds I considered as a self-hoster:

1. Patching /app/dist/server.mjs directly — the email texts are bundled inside this single compiled file. Possible with sed, but fragile: gets overwritten on every Pangolin update, and editing a bundled file risks breaking something.

2. Volume-mounting a patched server.mjs — same issue: needs to be re-patched on every release.

3. Custom Docker image extending the official one — more sustainable, but a lot of overhead just to translate a few strings, and still breaks on UI/template changes upstream.

None of these scale: the proper place for translations is in the project itself, alongside the existing UI i18n files.

Additional Context

Translations the community could likely contribute quickly once the framework exists: German, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Portuguese — all already present in the UI dropdown.

For reference, the strings I found bundled in /app/dist/server.mjs (v1.18.3) include phrases like "You've been invited", "Accept Invitation", "invited you to join", and "This invite expires in 3 days" — these are the prime candidates for the first translation pass.

Example: German translation for the invitation email

To make adoption easy, here is a ready-to-use German (Deutsch) translation of the current invitation email:

Subject:

• EN: You've been invited to join {organization}
• DE: Sie wurden zu {organization} eingeladen

Body:

Hallo,

Sie wurden von {inviter} eingeladen, {organization} beizutreten.
Klicken Sie auf den Button unten, um die Einladung anzunehmen und loszulegen.

[Einladung annehmen]

Diese Einladung läuft in {days} Tagen ab. Falls der Link abgelaufen ist,
wenden Sie sich bitte an den Eigentümer der Organisation, um eine neue
Einladung zu erhalten.

Example: German translation for the password reset email

Subject:

• EN: Reset your password
• DE: Passwort zurücksetzen

Body (suggested):

Hallo,

für Ihr Konto wurde ein Zurücksetzen des Passworts angefordert.
Klicken Sie auf den Button unten, um ein neues Passwort zu vergeben:

[Passwort zurücksetzen]

Dieser Link ist 1 Stunde gültig. Falls Sie das Zurücksetzen nicht
selbst angefordert haben, können Sie diese E-Mail einfach ignorieren —
Ihr Passwort bleibt dann unverändert.

Happy to refine these wordings or contribute additional language examples (the formal "Sie" form was used here, since it's the convention for SaaS-style B2B tools in German).

[dede34fr]

+1 — and please include the resource whitelist OTP email (ResourceOTPCode), not just invitation / password-reset. On a non-English instance this is the email end users receive on every resource login, so an English-only, Pangolin-branded message is the most visible gap.

Two concrete asks:

1. i18n — have email templates follow the instance / UI locale (or a configurable default locale in config.yml), with community-translatable message files.
2. Branding — allow overriding the letterhead logo and primary color per org (a config.yml option or a mounted templates directory), so emails match a custom-branded portal instead of the hard-coded Pangolin logo / #F97317.

On OSS today the only way to localize + brand these is to patch the compiled server.mjs at container start, which is undone by every image update. A supported override mechanism (locale + template/logo/colors) would be a big win for self-hosters. Thanks!