You must enable any languages you want to support in your Help Center. For each language you enable, you can add a translated Help Center name as well as translated snippets of text. Your Help Center languages are independent of any languages you have enabled in Zendesk Support.
After you enable languages for your Help Center, you can add localized content (see Localizing Help Center content), so that end users can choose the language they want in your Help Center.
Multi-language support is available on Guide Professional or Enterprise with Support Professional or Enterprise. You must be a Guide manager to configure Help Center languages.
Enabling languages for your Help Center
You can enable any Help Center languages you plan to support.
You need to set up your knowledge base to deliver content in your supported languages for your enabled languages.
Your Help Center languages are enabled independently of any languages you have enabled in Zendesk Support. If you enable a language in Guide that is not enabled in Support, when that language is selected in your Help Center, the "Submit a request" form will appear in the Support account default language.
To enable a language in your Help Center
- In Guide, click the Settings icon (
) icon in the sidebar, then select Language settings. - Click Add new language.
You can scroll or search the list. You can choose from any of the Guide supported languages and most of the languages that are available by request, some of which have crowd-sourced translations.
- Click the Language drop-down to select a language, then enter a Help Center name for the language.
The Help Center name might be the translated name of your default Help Center name.
- Click Add language.
- Click Add new language again if you want to add more languages.
A list of all your enabled languages appears on the Help Center Languages page.
- Click Save in the Help Center Languages page when you are finished.
Next, you need to set up your knowledge base to deliver content in your supported languages, if you haven't already done so.
Understanding how translated content is displayed in your Help Center
The difference between having a language enabled and having translated content available for that language has implications on what a user sees in a Help Center. For example, the default language for a Help Center might be set to US English (en-us). The Help Center might also provide translated content in French (fr). These examples explain some different scenarios.
- The user's browser language is a language that is not enabled in the Help Center. The user sees the article in the default language.
That is, a user with Polish (pl) set as their default browser language accesses this link: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/pl. The site is not translated into Polish so they are redirected to the default language site (support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us) and see the content in English.
- The user's browser language is a language that is enabled in the Help Center, and there is translated content in that language available for that article. The user automatically sees the translated content.
That is, if a user's default browser language is French, they see all articles that have been translated into French, even if the user has not specified the locale (fr) in the URL. If they access the link https://support.zendesk.com/hc, they are automatically redirected to https://support.zendesk.com/hc/fr.
- The user's browser language is a language that is enabled in the Help Center, but there is no translated content in that language available for that article. The user sees a page error.
That is, a user with French set as their default browser language sees all articles that have been translated into French, but if any articles are not translated, they get a message that the page does not exist. This is because the fr locale has been set up, but is not populated for every article.
In all examples, the user must specify a different locale specifically in the URL if they want to see the article in another supported language. If the language is enabled in the Help Center, and has translated content available for that article, they'll see that content. For example, if you type the URL https://support.zendesk.com/hc/de, you'll see German content, regardless of your default browser language.
- Redirect untranslated articles to an existing language
- Add a default language version of the article to the translation page. In our example, this would mean copying the English article into the French translation page (see delivering content in your supported languages).
How the default language setting works
The language that you see in your help center is based on defaulting to the following, in order of preference:
- The language specified in your URL
- The language of your session
- Your language preference
- The preferred language of your browser
- The language of a compatible browser
Removing a Help Center language
You can disable any language you have enable in your Help Center by deleting it in the Help Center Languages page.
To set up Help Center for multiple languages
- In Guide, click the Settings icon () icon in the sidebar, then click Language settings.
- Click the options menu beside the language you want to remove, then click Delete.
The language is removed from your list of languages, without a confirmation dialog. You can enable it again if necessary by clicking Add new language.
- Click Save in the Help Center Languages page when you are finished.
Changing a translated Help Center name
You can add a translated Help Center name when you enable a language. You can easily change the Help Center name for a language at any time.
To change a translated Help Center name
- In Guide, click the Settings icon () icon in the sidebar, then click Language settings.
- In the Help Center languages page, click in the name field for any language, then enter a new name.
- Click Save in the Help Center languages page when you are finished.
44 Comments
edit: My question was about unselecting additional languages in the Help Center. I was worried we would lose all the content from that specific language. Luckily, that didn't happen. The content is still there (not visible for our users) but our FAQ now offers one language less.
There seems to be a problem with the automatic language detection when navigating to the Help Center. For Norwegian, the language detection only works if the browser sends "no", but most browsers will send either "nb-no" or "nn-no" for Norwegian Bokmål and Norwegian Nynorsk respectively.
Please add support for this as soon as possible!
Ich zahlen 149.90 heute und was muss machen jetzt
How do I put different tags for different translations?
Our helpdesk is bieng built in 3 languages but the tags are common to all three versions of each article. I can envision this causing issues when people search. They will not get the article in the right language..
I could not find any article that addresses the question.
Hi,
I use the Enterprise version of Zendesk. I will have to enable the use of Guide in Azerbaijani which is currently not supported.
1. Is there a plan to include Azerbaijani to the list of supported languages?
2. If not, is there any work around I could use? i.e. switching Turkish on and hard-coding the language change into Azerbaijani?
Would appreciate an answer on that.
Thanks
Karol
Hi Karol,
As of now, Azerbaijani is not a supported language. The workaround that you described – hard-coding the translated articles – will definitely work. Choosing Turkey as a locale will automatically translate the default UI elements to Turkish, but with your articles and section/category titles, you have the liberty to translate them to Azerbaijani.
About the plans to update our supported languages – no definite timeline yet for that.
Gab
Hi there,
I added the Russian language in my zendesk support and it seems there is a automatically detection problem when I test the language switcher.
My default language is English and when I hover my mouse to the ‘support" page, it will automatically show me the English language even though my browser is Russian. I can only change the language manually.
Is there any way to let Zendesk Support change the language automatically according to the customer's preferred language?
Hi there,
Can we create a ROW locale so that customers who don't speak our translations of English, French, Dutch, German and Spanish can receive generic English FAQs?
Thanks
Hi there,
We would like to add new languages to our Help Center. The problem is that when we add an additional language, this language version of Help Center becomes "active" immidiately even though there is no content in that language yet. How can we avoid this? We don't want the additional language to be public until we have created all articles in this language... It seems that the browser redirects you to your preferred language if it exists, but we would like all visitors to see the Help Center in the default language until the other languages have been completed.
Please help!
Thanks
Hi Sofia! Sorry for the delayed response here. I asked around and there is unfortunately not an efficient way to accomplish what you're looking for. Someone suggested using the API to enable a language, create an article translation, then disable the language immediately, but we agreed that's a hacky workaround. That said, I shared this question and use case with the Guide product team, who understand the problem and agreed to consider it as a future feature request.
Hi Madison,
Thank you for your reply and for looking into this.
I think I might have found a workaround for us. I searched the Zendesk forums for some kind of solution and someone suggested a JS redirect script. But I didn't get the script to work. Could you take a look at it and see if you can detect what might be wrong?
$(document).ready(function redirectSV() {
if ((window.location.href === "http://oursubdomain.zendesk.com/hc/sv") && (HelpCenter.user.role == "anonymous" || HelpCenter.user.role == "end_user")) {
window.location.replace("http://oursubdomain.zendesk.com/hc/en-us");
}
});
Thanks!
//Sofia
Hello, My Guide is Professional edition, why i can not find "add language” button in my setting language page?
please help!
Hi Amanda! Though your Guide plan is Professional, it looks like your Support account is on an Essential plan. Multi-language Guide configuration is only available with a Support Professional plan or above. I hope that helps - let me know if you have any questions!
Hi Madison, we just subscript the plan last Tuesday, and you just told me that my subscription is wrong?
...
Ok, so what can i do? upgrade my subscription?
it looks like pay another time, not like upgrade, the system asked me pay for guide again, is there any balance?
Hi Amanda,
Sorry for any confusion! The issue is not with your Guide plan, but with your Support plan level. Your Support account is on the Essential plan. To have access to multiple languages in Guide, you must have both Guide Professional or above AND Support Professional or above. You can upgrade your Support plan level by having the account owner navigate to Product Tray > Admin Center > Billing > Subscription. You would not need to alter your Guide plan level. Support Professional does indeed cost more than Support Essential (you can view pricing here). I hope that helps!
Can we use Dynamic Content for Help Center name?
Hi Aswin! I just attempted this in a test account and it doesn't appear that the dynamic content placeholder will work for the Help Center name. Can you elaborate on what you'd like to achieve with dynamic content in that name field?
It's a convenient factor. We already have a dynamic content for our Help Center name, and would love to use the same here.
嗨，您好
我将禁令帮助中心的默认语言设置为简体中文，但是在每次进入系统的时候显示的还是英文，这让我很苦恼。但是在其他两个项目中引用了zendesk系统，有可以直接显示中文，请问这药怎么处理呢？
----
English Translation via Google Translate added by Zendesk Community Team:
I set the default language of the ban help center to Simplified Chinese, but it still shows me every time I enter the system, which makes me very upset. However, in the other two projects, the Zendesk system is cited, and there is a direct display of Chinese. How can I handle this?
Hello, I am not sure whether to ask this here. I am new to Zendesk Help Center and I am working on multilingual site. I configured English as default language and Spanish. There are three blocks on site, when I am on Spanish site and click on the block/link, it is redirecting to English site. Can someone please help me here
Hey Ali,
This would happen if you don't have a spanish translation of the section/article that the user is trying to access. You'll want to take a look at our Localizing Help Center content (Guide Professional and Enterprise) for more information.
I hope this helps!
@Guide Product Team
Two suggestions for improvements:
Hope these suggestions are valuable to your team. :)
Hello Wouter van Gessel,
I would recommend posting your feedback in our Product feedback forums so our development team can consider your feedback for future updates.
Best regards.
Can I use the Guide multiple language function if I only use essential support?
Hi Trissea,
Support Professional is required to have the multi-language feature.
Let me know if you have any other questions for me!
Just to clarify - if I "delete" a language, the content of the translated articles are not lost? They will all reappear if I re-add the language? Is there a way to access them once the language is "deleted"?
Hi Ayal,
Good question! It's always important to know if you're going to lose any work.
The translated content will still be available in the article editor for your team, it just will not show with the customer facing content on your help center with the language deleted. You can re-add the language later if something changes and use the translations again then.
I have a question similar to Ayal. We have translations for Spanish (Latin America). We want to move them as a generic Spanish. Is there a way to move the translations or mark them as another language? I'd hate to copy-paste everything.
Thanks, Gail!
Hi Aswin,
There isn't a way to change the language of the current articles, so the alternative to avoid copy and paste would be to build API workflows around the translations. We have some resources here with options for managing content translation.
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