Searching in a language may give results from other languages

OpenERP Users sometimes wonder why they get unexpected results from other languages when they search for documents.

This is due to the multilingual features of OpenERP, something that most people are not used to (traditional software only translates the UI, not the actual business data).

In order to make it easier to find what you're looking for, whenever a search is performed on a multilingual field, OpenERP searches in the database in 2 different languages: the user's language, and the default language (en_US). You won't normally notice this if you have a non-english database, because all translations will be identical (english name=french name). However if you are on a demo database (demo data are translated) or actually use multiple languages, you will notice it.
These alternative results may provide "similar matches", and may also help detect errors in translations, such as the one described in bug 802988 (if you duplicate a product, you need to change all the translations of the previous name, not just the current language).

Users are usually surprised about this in the context of Product names, but this is in fact true for all translatable fields, such as account names or stock location names. See also FAQ #1692