The default language is the language that end-users see in your help center by default. Your help center default language is initially set to English, but you can change the default language. You can set a default language for your help center that's different than the default language for the agent interface in Zendesk Support.
You must be a Guide admin to set the default language for your help center.
Setting the default language for your help center
Your help center default language is initially set to English. You can change the default language.
You can choose from all of the Guide supported languages and most of the languages that are available by request, some of which have crowd-sourced translations. If you choose a supported language, text that appears in the help center by default (for example, "search" and "comments"), will appear in that language. If you choose a language that is not supported, default text will appear in that language only if there are crowd-sourced translations.
If you have enabled multiple languages for your help center, you can change the default language to any of the languages you have enabled (see the next section).
To set your help center default language
- In Guide, click the Settings icon (
) icon in the sidebar, then click Language settings. - Click the Language drop-down, then select a language.
You can scroll or search the list. You can choose from all of the Guide supported languages and most of languages that are available by request, some of which have crowd-sourced translations.
- Click Save.
Changing your help center default language with multiple languages enabled
If you've configured multiple languages for your help center, you can change your help center default language to any of the languages you've enabled. To understand when the default language is used, see Understanding how the default language setting works with translated content.
To change your default language with multiple languages enables
- In Guide, click the Settings icon () icon in the sidebar, then click Language settings.
- Click the options menu beside the language you want to set as default, then select Set as default.
- Click Update.
Understanding how the default language settings works with translated content
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.
For more information about how translated content appears, see Understanding how translated content is displayed in your help center.
10 Comments
Help center is geolocation ready?
I want my english users to get automatically redirected to their language when the browser language is detected as english or their IP location. Currently, my default language is spanish, but I don't want english users to switch to their language manually.
Thanks.
Hey Juan,
If you've localized your content and set up the supported languages on your account then the users should be directed to the appropriate content baed on the language detected in their browser.
I would recommend taking a look at the following documentation for setting this up:
Let us know if you have any other questions :)
Can we redirect some articles to the English version if their other language variants are not yet ready? Meaning, I want to publish an article and all the Help Center languages should be seeing the English version, then the actual language version once we translate them after a week or so.
I have the same question as Aswin. Thanks you
Hey Damien,
If you'd like the English translation to show up then this would need to be set as the source language as mentioned here: Managing Help Center translations for articles
When the visitor navigates to your Help Center, it will try to pull the article translation based on the user's browser language. If no translation is available, the user will then be directed to the articles source language.
Let me know if the above doesn't make sense.
Thanks!
Brett - If the language is not available, Zendesk gives a 404 now. That's why we need a native solution to redirect them to the source language. I'm using a script I found in this post. But not everyone has a luxury of developer time.
Hey Aswin,
You shouldn't need to use custom code to redirect a user to the source language of your article. This should be accomplished natively through Guide. It's possible that the custom code you implemented in causing the 404 error you're receiving. Are you trying to redirect them from a deleted article or are you just trying to direct them to the source language if the language of their browser is not available?
I was getting 404 without using any code. This code actually helped with redirecting untranslated articles to the source language article. There is no native solution from Zendesk as far as I know. Perhaps you can double-check with your development/product team.
Hey Aswin,
It sounds like you have the visitor's language set up in your Help Center but there's no article translation for that particular language. As mentioned here, Configuring your Help Center to support multiple languages, 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.
If that's the case, the easier method would be to add a translated article for that particular language and include the English text so the visitor doesn't get directed to the error page.
Otherwise, as you mentioned you would need to use custom code. Apologies for the confusion there! I'll be sure to pass your feedback along to our Guide team.
Cheers!
Hi,
I'm currently looking into the language settings of Guide.
Is it possible to add an Icon for each language in the language selector?
Thank you in advance.
Marius
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