Some names appear in English

You have set your language, most of the page is translated, but a handful of items — a lab analyte, a vital sign, a medication ingredient — still read in English. That is expected, and it is deliberate.

This page is about item names, not page wording

The distinction matters, because the two have different answers.

Item names are the entries in UPC’s reference lists — the name of a lab test, a vital sign, a medication ingredient, a breed. These are translated one entry at a time, and an entry with no translation yet falls back to another language. That is what the rest of this page explains.

Page wording is everything UPC itself writes: buttons, menus, headings, messages, the “page not found” card. This is always translated into every language UPC offers. If you find page wording in English while the rest of the page is in your language, that is a bug rather than a fallback — please report it with the page address and your language.

Why it happens

Reference data on UPC is translated row by row. When an item has no translation in your language yet, UPC shows the next best thing it has rather than leaving the field blank or showing an internal code. A partly-English list is the fallback working, not a bug.

Newly added items are the usual cause: an item is created in English first, and its translations follow.

What UPC tries, in order

If you read UPC in Mexican Spanish and an item has not been translated into Mexican Spanish specifically, you will usually still see Spanish — not English. UPC looks for:

1. your exact language and region — Spanish (Mexico);
2. the main version of your language — Spanish (United States);
3. English;
4. nothing else — if even English is missing, see below.

So Spanish readers see Spanish wherever any Spanish translation exists, Persian readers see Persian, and so on. English is the last resort, not the first fallback.

This changed on 30 July 2026. Before then, an item missing your exact regional translation went straight to English, even when another version of your own language was available.

What you should not see

If an item shows as an all-caps identifier with underscores — NECK_CIRCUMFERENCE, ALANINE_AMINOTRANSFERASE — that is an internal code leaking into the page, and it is a bug. Before 2026-07-29 this could happen for a small number of items in non-English languages; those now fall back to English. If you still see one, please report it with the page URL and your language setting.

Pet names are a different thing

None of the above applies to the name of an animal. A pet’s call name and registered name are names, not vocabulary, so UPC never translates them and never falls back to an English version — there isn’t one. A dog called برف reads برف in every language.

If you write your pet’s name in a non-Latin script you can record its Latin spelling alongside it, and the profile shows both. That is a second spelling of one name, not a translation. See Pets → Names in your own script.

Checking your language

Your language comes from the /{language}/ segment in the address bar, which is also remembered in your browser. Switch it from the language picker in the header; the page reloads in the new language. Untranslated items will keep showing another version of your language, or English, until a translation is published — no action is needed on your part.