
If you have configured your Help Center to support multiple languages, you can add translated versions of each article in your Help Center, or add articles only in specific languages. The Help Center displays pages in different languages based on locale code in the page URL. Example, ".../hc/en-us". Any translated article must also have parent pages (section and category) translated in the same language.
You can also display snippets of translated text on Help Center pages. For example, a welcome message on the home page or a company tag line in the header.
Multi-language support is available on Guide Professional and Enterprise with Support Professional or Enterprise. You must be a Guide Manager to add localized content to Help Center.
Basic workflow for localizing Help Center in multiple languages
Here's the workflow for localizing Help Center in multiple languages:
- Configure Help Center to support your other languages, if you have not already done so (see Configuring your Help Center to support multiple languages).
- Get your articles translated in your supported languages. This is done outside of Help Center., but there are many options.
Note: Check out Unbabel in Zendesk Marketplace. Unbabel offers multilingual customer support with seamless ticket translation, including automated Help Center translations that enable you to localize FAQ content in 28 languages.
- Prepare your sections and categories by adding translated titles (see Adding translations to sections and categories to ensure translated articles display below).
- Add the translated content to Help Center (see Adding translated articles below).
- If needed, add translated text snippets (see Adding translated text below).
Many of the pre-built page elements used in Help Center are already localized. For example, the element that lets users vote on an article displays "Was this article helpful?" in English and "Cet article vous a-t-il été utile?" in French. You don't need to localize the strings. For a list of available translated strings, see the translation helper in the Help Center Templates docs.
It's a good idea to establish a localization process for ongoing additions and updates to Help Center.
Adding translations to sections and categories to ensure translated articles display
Any translated article must have a parent page translated in the same language. If you add a translation for an article that does not have a corresponding translation for the section or category, users will not be able to view the article in Help Center (even though the article is published).
The page hierarchy is as follows: Category landing page > Section landing page > Article. For example, if you add an article translated in German, the article must have a German section page. In turn, the German section page must have a German category page. The Help Center cannot display orphan articles.
When localizing your Help Center, it makes sense to start by adding localized versions of category pages, followed by section pages, followed by articles. This workflow guarantees that any new translated article has a parent page -- a section or category page -- that's translated in the same language so that users can view it.
You must be a Guide Manager to add section and category translations.
To add a translated title for a section or category
- In Help Center, navigate to an existing section or category.
- Click Edit section or Edit category in the top menu bar.
- Select a language for the translation you want to add from the list at the top of the page.
If you do not see a drop-down menu of languages, then you first need to enable languages for your Help Center (see Enabling languages for your Help Center).
- Enter or paste the translated content for the name and (optionally) description.
Keep in mind that any translated page must have a parent page translated in the same language. After you add the translation for the parent page, you can click Refresh and it will take up to three minutes before the change is registered.
Note: You'll see a warning if you add a translation for a section that does not have a corresponding translation for the category. As a best practice to prevent these warnings, create the translated categories first, then go through and translate the sections. - Click Update translation to create the translated version of the page.
- Repeat the steps to add more translated pages.
Adding translated articles
You can add translated versions of existing articles. You can also add translated articles that don't have versions in other languages.
When you add translated versions of existing pages, the original article and its translated versions share the same URL except for the locale. This feature can simplify managing your content. For example, the following URLs point to the U.S. English and French versions of the same article:
https://mondocam.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/202529393
https://mondocam.zendesk.com/hc/fr/articles/202529393
Users can also manually switch to a different language by selecting it from the language menu in your Help Center.
To add a translated version of an existing page
- In Help Center, navigate to the existing page.
- Click Edit article in the top menu bar.
- Select a language for the translation you want to add from the list at the top of the page.
If you do not see a drop-down menu of languages, then you first need to enable languages for your Help Center (see Enabling languages for your Help Center).
- Enter or paste the translated content into the draft article.
Keep in mind that any translated page must have a parent page translated in the same language. You'll see a warning if you add a translation for an article that does not have a corresponding translation for the section or category. For example:
After you add the translation for the parent page, you can click Refresh and it will take up to three minutes before the change is registered.
- When you are finished, do one of the following:
- To save your article translation as a draft and publish it later, click Save.
- To publish your article translation, click the drop-down arrow on the Save button, then select Publish.
- To save your article translation as a draft and publish it later, click Save.
- Repeat the steps to add more translated pages.
To add a translated page with no version in another language
- Click Add in the top menu bar, then select the kind of page you want to add.
- Select the language of the content from the list at the top of the page.
- Enter or paste the content into the page.
- When you are finished, do one of the following:
- To save your article translation as a draft and publish it later, click Save.
- To publish your article translation, click the drop-down arrow on the Save button, then select Publish.
- To save your article translation as a draft and publish it later, click Save.
Adding translated text
- A welcome message on the home page
- A company tag line in the header
- A legal notice in the footer
- Service alerts
Many of the pre-built page elements used in Help Center are already localized. For example, the element that lets users vote on an article displays "Was this article helpful?" in English and "Cet article vous a-t-il été utile?" in French. You don't need to localize the strings. For a list of available translated strings, see the translation helper in the Help Center Templates docs.
This functionality uses the dynamic content feature in Support. This feature is not meant to be used to localize articles, titles, and other Help Center template elements that support multiple languages. See Adding translated pages above and the translation helper docs in Help Center Templates for more information.
Specifying the language variants of the text in Support
You specify the language variants of a snippet of text on the Manage > Dynamic Content page in Zendesk Support. For instructions, see Providing multiple language support with dynamic content. Example:
Add the content in the same language variants as the languages you support on your Help Center. If you don't specify a variant for a language, nothing will be displayed in that language in the Help Center. For example, suppose your Help Center supports English and French for a Canadian website. Add English and French variants of each snippet of text.
Make a note of the item name. You'll need it for the following step. In the previous example, the placeholder is {{dc 'welcome_message'}}
, so the item name is "welcome_message".
Inserting the dynamic content in a template in Guide
Insert your text variants in Help Center templates with the dynamic content helper. When the page is requested by a web browser, the template helper inserts the appropriate text variant.
- In Guide, click the Customize design icon (
) in the sidebar.
- Click the theme you want to edit to open it.
- Click Edit Code.
- In the Templates section, click the template you want to modify.
The page opens in the code editor.
- Add the dynamic content in your template using the dynamic content helper. Example:
{{dc 'welcome_message'}}
- To save your changes, click Save at the top of the sidebar.
For more information on working with templates, see Working with the page code.
67 Comments
Hi Rebecca, you can use Dynamic content to insert text, images etc. into a template.
Here is a good article on how to do that.
Hey Jacob,
Thanks for the reply, I'm aware of dynamic content and have tried it in my help center template. However, I'm interested in whether it's possible to modified the text in an existing help center template helper such as this one: https://developer.zendesk.com/apps/docs/help-center-templates/advanced_helpers#request_form-helper.
When I output this helper, this string of text "Let us know what we can help you with!" is printed with the helper. I'm wondering if there is a way to modify that text and provide a translation for the modified text.
Thank you!
Ah I see. Unfortunately, I think I'm on the very edge of where I can possibly be helpful then. I have just one shot left.
If you navigate to Admin > Ticket forms (I'm assuming you're on the Enterprise plan) there's a box for inserting End user instructions - it also accepts Dynamic Content.
Could you please check if the text string you're seeing is coming from here?
Hey Jacob,
Ah that's exactly what I was looking for! Thank you for your help!
We have turned on Localisation in our Sandbox and added one other language.
I have translated one article, category and section to test it ... but when I added the alternative locales code to the footer I am getting an error when I select the German HC to view.
The message that pops up is;
oops
The page you were looking for doesn't exist
You may have mistyped the address or the page may have moved"
It seems it is not recognising the other HC even though it appears as an option in the footer.
Do you have to have certain pages translated for the HC to appear, could you just have the Submit a Request page translated (with dynamic content) for example?
This is the code pasted into the footer:
<div class=“footer-language-selector”>
{{#if alternative_locales}}
<div class=“dropdown language-selector” aria-haspopup=“true”>
<a class=“dropdown-toggle”>
{{current_locale.name}}
</a>
<span class=“dropdown-menu dropdown-menu-end” role=“menu”>
{{#each alternative_locales}}
<a href=“{{url}}” dir=“{{direction}}” rel=“nofollow” role=“menuitem”>
{{name}}
</a>
{{/each}}
</span>
</div>
{{/if}}
</div>
Any help is appreciated.
Hi,
I scrolled through the comments here, but maybe I missed it. Is it possible to send article labels to Transifex to be localized (versus doing them somewhere else like a doc or spreadsheet and then having to copy and paste them all over)?
Hi Jake!
I imagine it depends on what Transifex requires in order to do their translations. That said, I'm not sure what the article labels would provide to them. Maybe I'm misunderstanding your question...could you go into a little more detail about the workflow you're hoping to achieve?
Hi Jessie! We have some concerns around search results and what appears, and even more so when it comes to supported languages. We think that being able to easily translate labels via Transifex would help by being able to include tags that users would search but would not necessarily be in the article. Does that make more sense? Let me know, happy to elaborate further.
Hi All,
I have configured my Knowledge Base to support multiple languages but for some reason the language bar is not showing up on the site. What do I need to do add a language bar on my site?
Regards,
Tony I
Scentsy Knowledge Base Content Admin.
Hi @Anthony,
Do you mean this?:
Not sure if that's what you looking for. If so, you can set that by goung to
Guide Admin > Guide Settings > (browse down to:) Additional Languages , and tick the boxes for the Languages you want to show on the Help Center for selection.
Hi Anthony,
If you're using the Copenhagen theme, you should find the language selector code in the Footer.hbs
Hope that helps you out.
I want to promote this feature request of automatic creation of a "translation" which has the original language:
Cloning article text into translations
Hello I encounter a problem here.
We have English, Traditional Chinese and Simplified Chinese in our Help Center, English is default. We used Zendesk SDK integration in our Apps. However, the user will always see Simplified Chinese help center even if the language setting of the device is English or Traditional Chinese. Could you guide us any solutions? Thank you.
Hi there, Clare!
Utilizing the SDK is going to be largely tied to custom coded solutions. This is not directly supported by Zendesk, unfortunately, but there is likely an aspect of your SDK use that sets the language of the help center to your default address.
I would recommend reviewing the options to localize the text within your App. We have documentation on the process at that link!
Is it possible to translate everything in the help center except the articles?
My scenario is this, we only provide articles in English at this point in time, but we'd like to provided the Help Center theme in a couple of languages we are going to be supporting.
By having the language picker in the Navbar customers can select their language from what we are going to support and start navigating around our help center, with the only condition that the articles and community forum are in english.
The roadblock I've noticed is that when I select another language in the HC the english articles disappear is there a way to keep english articles when everything else is in the selected language?
Hi Adam,
You are right when you select a language where there are no articles translated (and published), neither the articles or the sections and categories will show.
The most immediate solution to your issue would be to provide duplicate English translations for the languages you want to support - basically copy/pasting your English content to the language variants of the same article.
However, that could be very time consuming if you have a lot of content, both to set up and to maintain, and it also might have a negative impact on the articles Google ranking (I'm not really sure if this is still the case).
Alternatively, you may want to add a Google Translate widget to your help center as shown in this community post. I would recommend this last option, hope that helps you out.
I am on a trip to China now, and you have not understood how much you rely on Google until you can't reach it...
We have many customers here, so Google Translate is not an option for us.
Good point Niclas, I had not considered Google being unavailable.
I'm unsure how the Google Analytics Widget solution mention before would behave in that scenario, but you could test it here if you'd like:
https://support.aodocs.com/hc/en-us
Not well...
What is the user experience like, will it continue to show the English content when other languages are selected?
Hey Jacob,
Thanks for the information, that is a bummer. We've looked into google translate, but noticed that the translations are horrible. We support Japanese and Spanish and English is our main language, when we have done test runs our Spanish and Japanese Support agents are typically horrified by how bad the translation is by Google Translate so we've stayed clear from it.
Hmmm, I wonder if Zendesk has a way to override that step and show the articles?
@Jacob, I don't see a way to change languages.
In Copenhagen theme, the language setting is in the footer left but it does not show in AODocs.
Hi Adam and Niclas,
Sorry for the extremely late reply, I hadn't noticed your updates.
@Adam
Is there a reason you're not just staying with one enabled language (English) until the other languages are ready? If you only have one language enabled the language picker shouldn't be visible.
@Niclas
I think it's a custom theme, the language picker is located in the header here.
Nope, that does not show for me.
Niclas, my recommendation to add a Google translate widget to the help center was a response to the use case Adam presented above. If you are in a market where Google services are blocked, then this is not a good solution for you - I do like that nothing breaks or looks weird in this case though.
If you have the skills and resources, you may consider building something similar to the GA widget solution, using alternative translation services. I don't have anything more concrete to offer here, unfortunately.
Now I'm back in Sweden... :-)
Hey @Jacob,
Thanks for your response, so we are currently just staying with one language as our default language, which is english.
Our goal is to try and help our customers who use another language as their main language to navigate our help center as navigating the site in english might be hard for them.
All our documents are currently in English, but if I'm able to change certain buttons/navigation icons etc into their native language when they are in the help center it'll help them to be able to find the correct document/information thats in english.
Hope this makes sense, this is where I'm curious is using Dynamic Content will help or not.
Hi @Adam,
This is exactly where the Dynamic Content comes in. You can use DC across your theme where you have used hard coded text and want tk localize it.
Thanks
Hey @Trapta,
Thanks for confirming. I have one follow-up question.
The customer would then see that Dynamic content based on their location or language settings in their browser, correct?
or
Would I need to enable the language selector? My understanding with the language selector is that it would hide the english articles when another language was selected.
Resurfacing this comment because the links in it no longer function: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/203664336/comments/115000971608
Is there any way to export HC article content like you can Dynamic Content to have it translated and then re-uploaded as a single file?
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