You must enable all of the languages that 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.
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).
The language that a user sees in your help center is based on defaulting to the following, in order of preference:
- The language specified in the URL of the page the user is currently on (if present)
- The language set for the user's current active session
- The language preference set in the user's user profile
- The preferred language of the user's browser
- Other compatible languages specified by the user's browser
If the help center is unable to match any of these languages, then the user is directed to the default language of your help center.
These examples explain some different scenarios.
- Scenario 1 - 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 will see the content in English.
- Scenario 2 - 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.
- Scenario 3 - 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 article will not show up in the browser language's version of the help center. If the user tries to navigate manually to that article, in a language that it has not been translated into, then the user sees a page error, or is redirected to the home page for that language.
For example, 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, if a user wants to manually change the language that they view an article in, then they must specify a different locale in the URL or change the language in the help center language drop-down menu. 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.
If you provide only some of your content in other languages, consider one of the following solutions:
- 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.
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 your 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.
- On the Help Center languages page, click in the name field for any language, then enter a new name.
- Click Save on the Help Center Languages page when you are finished.
48 Comments
To the best of my understanding, I have read everything relevant on the subject matter at hand. I understand that multiple languages can and should also be enabled in Guide Professional proving you are the Guide Manager.
When I get to target pages in Help Center Setting it does not look anything like what is described here above. I can set the language for the default HC only. There is NO ADD facility of function.
I am clearly misunderstanding something.
Thank you for your much-anticipated help
Chris
Hi Chris,
Are the languages already enabled in your Support account? And just to confirm, is your Support subscription either Professional or Enterprise as well?
Let us know and we'll try to get this sorted with you.
Best,
Hi all, I'm testing the Copenhagen theme in our Sandbox. We have the "Wiry Merchant" theme (customized) in our production Help Center. We have English source language and 4 languages set up with translations currently in production. In our production HC, we have a drop-down for manual language selection in our top menu (along with browser language automatic selection). I'd like to have the same in Copenhagen. Right now, I don't have a web developer working on this with me and my coding knowledge is limited. I'm not seeing anything in the documentation about this feature being available in standard Copenhagen. Does anyone know if this functionality is possible in the standard theme settings...or would it require customization?
Another related issue: I do have these 4 additional languages enabled in the Help Center Sandbox with the Copenhagen theme, and we have a developer who is using the API to backup the production HC and restore the categories, sections, and articles and translations into the Sandbox for testing. In the first test run, the translations came into the HC Sandbox as separate source language articles; in other words, they are not showing as the translation for the English source article. Any ideas why that might be happening?
Thanks in advance for any assistance!
Hi Sally! In the Copenhagen theme, the language selector lives in the footer. The good news is that it's super easy to move this from the footer to the header.
You'd just want to cut these lines from the footer.hbs template:
Hi Madison, that was so helpful...I completely missed the language selector in the footer. Seems an odd place for it to live...but glad it's there and I appreciate your instructions on how to easily move it to the top.
I have more questions about how that works and might interact with browser language selection, but I think I'll post those on a translation related article.
I also appreciate your thoughts on our issues with the API and I will pass those along to our developer. I know the languages are enabled, but I don't know the other details about his script. I raised a ticket to get support on this as well.
Thanks so much!
Happy to help, Sally Anne! Please feel free to follow up with another comment if any additional questions come up!
I want to enter my pt address
Hi Mohamed,
Could you provide additional detail? I am not sure what your question is.
We're having a challenge with testing our backup and restore for translated HC articles in our Sandbox. For our French translations (setting selected is just "French" for the Guide language), the translations are coming in from the API restored to French(fr). This means that when the user selects French for the language selector drop-down, the articles don't display. Any ideas on 1) why this is happening, and 2) guidance on using variants of languages for this use case? We are also planning for Spanish (Spain), Spanish (LatAm), Chinese (Simplified), and Chinese (Traditional) so I want to avoid future issues.
Thanks!
Hey Sally,
It looks like you currently have a ticket open with our Customer Care regarding this issue. We will continue working with you in that ticket as the team will most likely need to take a look at some examples to determine the cause of this issue.
Cheers!
Thanks, Brett. I'd also appreciate any feedback of a general nature from others who may have run into similar issues and how they resolved them. The language selections in the Guide are sometimes very confusing.
Hi Team,
There seems to be an issue with the multilingual routing.
For example, users that land on https://help.example.co/hc/en-us (without the extra "/" at the end) will have a homepage with https://help.example.co/hc/en-us/articles/36002405313 link and it doesn't work as expected, getting the below error message:
oops
The page you were looking for doesn't exist
You may have mistyped the address or the page may have moved
If the user lands on https://help.example.co/hc/en-us/ (with the extra"/") they will have a homepage with https://help.example.co/hc/en-us/categories/36002405313 link and it works fine.
How can we force this extra "/" or what other options do we have to handle this for an user that lands without this extra "/" at the end?
Thanks!
Hi Marco! Unfortunately I'm not able to replicate the behavior you're describing with these example domains. It sounds like there might be something misbehaving in your particular account. Is your help center public, and are you comfortable sharing the URL here, or would you prefer we move into a ticket?
Madison Davis can we move into a ticket? Please let me know how to proceed. Thank you!
Hello,
If I delete a language, will all the help center articles in that language be archived? Thanks
Hello,
I have 5 languages on my help center. If an article is not translated in one language, is there a way to hide this language in the dropdown menu ?
Is there a configuration setting or method to serve off articles in all available language when the end-users language has not yet had the article translated?
EG: Bob is a native Esperanto speaker and reader, he search for "Rajdu mulon" in Guide/Help Center. There is no Esperanto article for this, but there are english and german versions.
English: How to Ride a Mule
German: Reite ein Maultier
How can one provide always provide results for a KB search that lists ALL the languages a article is available in?
Hello,
Thanks for reaching out! You must enable all of the languages that you want to support in your help center in order to serve off articles in all available languages that you want. You can choose from any of the Guide supported languages and most of the languages that are available by request.
If you choose a supported language, text that appears in the help center by default (for example, "search" and "comments"), is displayed in that language.
Kindly check this article here for you to be guided accordingly: Configuring your help center to support multiple languages
Let me know if you need further assistance.
Clifford James Lacson |Associate Customer Advocate|
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