Choose the language your QR code shows, every time
Every SignSafe QR code has always been multilingual by default. Scan it with a phone set to Spanish and you see Spanish. Scan it with a phone set to Vietnamese and you see Vietnamese. That is still true today, and it always will be.
But some signs need to say the same thing to everyone, no matter what language their phone is set to. A safety notice with wording your legal team approved. A community bulletin for a neighborhood where one language dominates. A sign your staff proofread once and needs to trust every time it is scanned. For cases like these, we just shipped a new option: language lock.
What language lock does
Open any asset in your account and you will see a new field called Language Presented. By default it is set to "Multilingual," which is the behavior you already know: the sign adapts to whatever language the visitor's device is using. Click the dropdown, pick a specific language instead, and that asset now shows that language on every single scan, regardless of the visitor's own device settings.
There is a small question mark icon right next to the field. Click it any time and it explains the setting in plain language, so nobody on your team has to guess what it does.
Where this helps
- Compliance and safety signage. When wording has been reviewed and approved, a language lock keeps it exactly as written, in the language it was approved in.
- Single-audience locations. A community center, cultural venue, or neighborhood business that primarily serves one language group can skip the auto-detect step entirely and always show that language first.
- Multi-language properties with per-location needs. A property with mixed signage can lock some assets to a specific language while leaving the rest multilingual, asset by asset.
Everything downstream of that setting respects it too. Text-to-speech playback, the emergency reporting flow, and the maintenance reporting flow all switch to the locked language along with the sign itself, so the experience stays consistent from the first tap to the last.
A wide language list, including languages that matter to us
The language list was built with real, documented traffic in mind, not just the handful of languages that show up most often. It includes te reo Māori, Samoan, Tongan, Cook Islands Māori, and Hawaiian, alongside the languages you would expect: Spanish, Chinese (both Simplified and Traditional), Vietnamese, Arabic, Tagalog, and dozens more. Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu also render right to left automatically, exactly as a native reader would expect.
How to turn it on
- Open Add New Asset, or edit an existing one.
- Find the Language Presented field.
- Leave it on "Multilingual" for the default behavior, or choose a specific language to lock it.
- Save. Your asset card will show the locked language at a glance, and Asset Statistics still shows you what languages visitors' devices were actually requesting, so you never lose that insight even on a locked asset.
No new QR code, no reprint. The change applies immediately to the code you already have posted.
Still multilingual where it counts
This is an addition, not a replacement. Multilingual auto-detect remains the default for every new asset, exactly as it has always worked. Language lock is there for the handful of signs where one consistent language matters more than adapting to the visitor, and now you get to choose which is which, asset by asset.