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.
Content blocks can be used in translated articles, but do not have the same multi-language support as help center articles. See Using content blocks in translated articles.
You must be a Guide Admin to add localized content to your help center.
Basic workflow for localizing your help center in multiple languages
Here's the workflow for localizing your help center in multiple languages:
- Configure your 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 the
help center, but there are many options.Note: To browse third party apps that can help you perform this task, see Zendesk Marketplace.
- 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 your 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 your 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 your 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 the 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 Admin to add section and category translations.
To add a translated title for a section or category
- In your help center, navigate to an existing section or category.
- Click Edit section or Edit category in the top menu bar.
- In the left sidebar, click the Language drop-down list, then select a language
for the translation you want to add.
If you do not see a drop-down menu of languages, then you first need to enable languages for your help center (see Configuring your help center to support multiple languages).
- 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 your help center, navigate to the existing page, then click Edit article in the top menu bar.
- Click the Translation panel icon (
) on the collapsible panel.
- Click the Add language icon (+) to add a new language.
- Select a language for the translation you want to add from the list.
This list displays all languages that you've enabled across all brands in your account.
If you do not see a list of languages, then you first need to enable languages for your help center (see Configuring your help center to support multiple languages).
- 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 working on your article, do one of the following:
- To save your new article as a draft or work in progress to publish later, click
Save.
Click Preview to view the article in your help center.
- When you're ready to publish your article, click the drop-down arrow on the
Save button, then select Publish.
To see how your published article looks in the help center, click View.
- To save your new article as a draft or work in progress to publish 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.
- Click the language displayed at the top of the page.
- Select the language of the content from the list.
This list displays all languages that you've enabled across all brands in your account.
- Enter or paste the content into the page.
- When you are finished working on your article, do one of the following:
- To save your new article as a draft or work in progress to publish later, click
Save.
Click Preview to view the article in your help center.
- When you're ready to publish your article, click the drop-down arrow on the
Save button, then select Publish.
To see how your published article looks in the help center, click View.
- To save your new article as a draft or work in progress to publish 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 your 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 the Admin Center. 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 the Admin Center
You specify the language variants of a snippet of text in the Admin Center. 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.
33 comments
Adam Hanna
it looks like these two links around what I am trying to do are no longer working https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115007227107-Can-I-display-the-default-language-version-of-an-article-in-a-translated-section-
https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115009599648-Fallback-to-default-language-if-articles-aren-t-translated-to-end-user-language
Is there any update on the potential of that feature (or a new community request) that could be linked?
0
Brett Bowser
Hey Adam,
Can you clarify what functionality you're looking for with Guide localization? According to this article, iff the end-user's language is not one of your supported languages, the default variant is used.
Let me know if I'm not quite understanding what you're looking for!
0
Adam Hanna
Thanks for the quick response! 2 similar but different cases:
1) We always have default versions of English for all articles and get our translations afterwards. Sometimes these translations take longer so we can not wait to make the English versions live, but if linked to on our UI doesn't exist for half our customer base. Ideally if a Chinese version didn't exist, it would default to the English version.
2) For certain articles, such as Terms and Conditions for promotions being run, there is only ever an English version causing the same issue
It looks like this was discussed in the articles I linked based on titles, but they no longer exist so wasn't sure of the conversation and any potential outcomes
1
Work Angel Technology / Lifeworks (UK) Ltd.
@zendesk can we get an update on the potential of a fallback language option when a translation is missing for an article?
1
Sally Anne Dishong
I'm trying to find information on how we might localize images in our translated articles. We're currently using the Unbabel connector to translate the article text, but the images (which are mainly product screenshots) remain in English. Unbabel does not currently offer this feature in the connector. Any suggestions on a work-around? Is there any way to use dynamic content for article images? I know we could manually update the images, but each time an article is submitted as a change it would revert back to the English (source) language version in Unbabel's workflow. I'm also aware that Smartling is offering this functionality in their connector, but we're not looking to change translations vendors at this time. Thanks in advance for any ideas!
2
Charles Nadeau
Hi Sally Anne,
I'm not sure if there's a solution for Unbabel. The Zendesk Docs team doesn't use Unbabel or any connector to manage article translations.
You could use a script to rewrite the image urls after the translations are posted by Unbabel. The script logic could work like this:
1. Use the Translations API to download the newly posted translations.
2. Parse the article HTML to find the urls of any English images.
3. For each image url, modify it to point to the localized version of the image.
4. Use the API to upload the translation's updated HTML.
We use a version of this approach for our translated articles. See this function on GitHub: https://github.com/chucknado/zep/blob/master/zep/handoff.py#L373.
If you use image attachments in your articles, we recommend hosting the images on a CDN such as Amazon S3 so updating the url is easier. For example, you could organize your images on the CDN by locale:
/images/en/
/images/fr/
/images/es/
Then your script only needs to replace "/en/" with "/fr/" or "/es/".
This is what it looks like for Zendesk images:
https://zen-marketing-documentation.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/en/hc_language_list2.png
https://zen-marketing-documentation.s3.amazonaws.com/docs/fr/hc_language_list2.png
A script replaced "/en/" with "/fr/" in the French translation of the article.
1
Sally Anne Dishong
Hi Charles! Thanks so much for your thorough and helpful response. Your suggestions are over my head technically, but I will pass them along to our developers and see if there's any hope of implementation this type of solution.
0
Abdul Khader Malim
English(world) : en-001 locale is not available in my zendesk account list. How to add that ?
![](/hc/user_images/WrLkSHGQqV30bytE4n3LpA.png)
0
Evan McGivern
Hi I am not sure if this article is meant to be public where you mention Thibauts tip for the Google translate but it doesn't open and gives an error: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/115009369268
0
Madison Hoffman
Thanks for reporting that, Evan! It looks like that post was archived. I'll report to our team to get this updated :)
1
Aldo Ercolani
I am following the "Adding translated text" section in order to add support for italian, german and romanian in Guide.
My Zendesk interface is in italian but Help Center's default language in English (GB).
I added the languages in Support (e.g. for romanian):
I created the dynamic content in Support:
I used the dc helper in the page footer source code (footer.hbs):
What happens:
I don't know how to fix points 2) and 3).
Thanks
0
Diana Voroniak
Try Crowdin+Zendesk integration for your articles localization.
Your source texts from Zendesk will automatically be uploaded to your Crowdin localization project and become available to translators. Translated content arrives in your Help Center at a period you specify (for example, every 3 hours).
Learn more in our article about Zendesk Help Center localization.
0
Lilian Herman
We are ready to launch our first translated help center but our Categories and Sections in the TOC are not picking up the translated names. I believe this is the code I need to modify to pick up the translated category names, but I'm not a coder and we are behind schedule. Can anyone advise?
// Get categories feed
if ($('.sidebar-list.dynamic').length > 0){
$.ajax({
url: "/api/v2/help_center/categories.json",
type: 'GET',
contentType: "application/json",
dataType: 'json',
}).done(function(data) {
var count = $(data.categories).length;
$(data.categories).each(function(i){
var title = this.name;
var link = this.html_url;
$('<li><a href="' + link +'">' + title + '</a></li>').appendTo('.sidebar-list');
// Fade in the sidebar list
if (i+1 === count) {
$('.sidebar-list').addClass('loaded');
}
});
// Mark current category
var thisLocation = window.location.href;
var thisOrigin = window.location.origin;
$('.sidebar-list a[href="' + thisLocation + '"]').addClass('current');
var thisCat = $('.breadcrumbs li:nth-of-type(2) a').attr('href');
$('.sidebar-list a[href="' + thisOrigin + thisCat + '"]').addClass('current');
});
}
0
Tipene Hughes
Hi Lilian Herman,
The /api/v2/help_center/categories.json endpoint will return a list of categories in the default language of your help center. You can add a locale to the request to return a list of translated categories, if the translated content is available. For example, this will return a list of categories that have french translations available:
/api/v2/help_center/fr/categories.json
I hope this helps! Feel free to reach out with any questions.
Tipene
0
Lilian Herman
Thanks Tipene.
Yes - but we need to display the locale/language of the category that the current browser window is using. We'll eventually have several languages and the script needs to dynamically load the category names for the current locale. I already figured out how to iterate through each translation of each category and compare it to the window locale, so this part is working.
However, now the categories are loading into the sidebar in a random order each time the page is refreshed or another page is launched. I can step through the code in the Chrome Developer and it does not do that, but if I just let the code run, it shuffles the category list every time. I even have the categories sorted by position, so I've not figured this part out yet, and it's infuriating!
0
Tipene Hughes
Hi Lilian Herman,
You could use something like this to dynamically grab the translated content based on the browser language:
This will ensure that the results are returned in the correct language and in a consistent order. One addition I'd suggest to this is having a default language in case a users browser language is not supported by your help center.
0
Dmitry Drozdov
Hi ZenDesk Support Team,
We have HelpCenter article translated in different languages, which we want to send to our users. Instead of having one link per language, we would like to send a dynamic link, which would identify browser/device language and show users a relevant version of the article. Is there a way to do that? We tried removing the language code from the link, but it becomes broken.
Please advise.
Many thanks.
1
Stefano Nguma
Why is it that some languages supported by Guide are not supported by localization in the Admin Center. I have a help center with Italian (Switzerland) as one of the language added in guide, but there is no option to add it in my localization settings? Since it's not available in the localization settings, I can't add Italian (Switzerland) as a variant for one of the dynamic content elements I'm using in guide so it displays in the default language selected in Guide. The frustrating part is that I have to get the feature voted on to get it added which is unlikely since it's not a popular language. You would think there would be a one-to-one match in Guide and localization settings but apparently that is not the case.
-1
Christine Diego
Hi Stefano Nguma,
I will be creating a ticket on your behalf to further check your issue. Thank you!
0
Gustavo Oliveira
Try structuring the URL without any locale specified (i.e. https://support.zendesk.com/hc/articles/4408834328090-Localizing-help-center-content) then it will route the user to their browser language automatically if the translation exists.
Best regards,
0
Matty
We have standard article answer bot
We have articles in English but also copies of the same articles in Italian
The problem is that when the questions and/or keywords are typed in English we have several examples that the article being presented is the Italian copy and not the English - can someone help please?
2
Hiedi Kysther
Hi Matty,
I believe your issue is already addressed in the ticket you submitted with us. Should you need further assistance or have other concerns, please don't hesitate to reach out. We'll be happy to help! Cheers!
0
Rasmus Lynggaard
It seems like there is no way to edit the built in translations (t helpers). Is that correct?
If so, do you have it in your roadmap, because it's a really needed feature. It seems like we have to customize the theme, "just" because we're not happy with the wording which comes out of the box. It would be a really nice feature if the built in t helpers could be edited to fit our brand experience.
0
Casey Keefe
Hi Zendesk!
I've scoured the Help Center, but have been unable to find code snippets to perform the following:
In our footer, the US mailing address for our company is displayed by default (English-US). I would like to be able to hide that mailing address and display the mailing address for the selected language, such as the UK mailing address when English-GB is selected.
I have enabled Dynamic Content and am able to get the UK mailing address to appear. However, the US mailing address is also still there when English-GB is selected as language.
In short:
-Selected language = English (US) >> Display US mailing address in footer only
-Selected language = English (GB) >> Display UK mailing address in footer only
Thank you!
0
Sabra
Hey Rasmus Lynggaard! There is not a way to manually edit the built-in translations, but if you have feedback on our translated strings, we'd be more than happy to provide this feedback to our localization team who will make changes as appropriate. If you reach out to Zendesk Customer Support, they can get translation feedback submitted for you :) If you want to create custom translations, you can customize the theme and use dynamic content.
Casey Keefe it seems like you have made steps in the right direction with your custom code. I'd recommend reaching out to our Customer Support team so we can take a closer look into what you have currently set up for your account and see what recommendation we can provide for you!
0
Rasmus Lynggaard
Sabra Thank you for getting back. It's not that I have any specific translations that needs feedback. It's because different clients have different tone of voices and would like to express themselves in that tone of voice. E.g. I'm currently working for a client in the transportation sector and for them a ticket is not a Zendesk ticket, but the ticket you buy to travel :-)
0
Chan Q Le
Hello, when i customize the chat bot language according to Vietnamese language on ios. Every try is working properly but only one case is still showing English? I checked and can't find that key anywhere on zendesk's documentation. Please see attached picture for details.
This is link that I prefer
https://developer.zendesk.com/documentation/classic-web-widget-sdks/unified-sdk/ios/localize_text/
I think the documentation is missing this case
Thank you
0
Hiedi Kysther
Hi Chan Q Le,
I have created a ticket on your behalf so we can investigate this further. Please check your email for more information. Thanks!
0
GoGet Support
Hi, we have recently localised some of our articles and the articles are available on https://support.goget.my/hc/ms-my.
How can we make it available on our mobile Zendesk SDK? Could you share the documents for our developer? Thank you.
0
Grace Sutachan
If I have my help center localized to French and the default language is US English, and I have a link like so:
And the following conditions are met:
When clicking the link above, should the user be redirected to the French version of the article, or will de article open in the default language?
Or do the links have to have the fr/ locale specified for them to open in French?
0