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Localizing help center content



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Charles Nadeau

Zendesk Documentation Team

Edited Feb 07, 2025


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33 comments

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?

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Brett Bowser

Zendesk Community Manager

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!

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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

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@zendesk can we get an update on the potential of a fallback language option when a translation is missing for an article?

1


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!

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Charles Nadeau

Zendesk Documentation Team

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.

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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.

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English(world) :  en-001 locale is not available in my zendesk account list. How to add that ?

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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

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Madison Hoffman

Zendesk Digital Resources Team

Thanks for reporting that, Evan! It looks like that post was archived. I'll report to our team to get this updated :)

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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:

  1. it gets the correct text in english and italian
  2. it shows english for romanian (but it keeps the /ro-ro in the url). When previewing in Admin mode it shows the error "Could not find substitute for dynamic content named footer_privacy_title", but it's there.
  3. it redirects to /en-gb when I try to open the page in the /de-de

I don't know how to fix points 2) and 3).

Thanks

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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.

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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');

     
      });

      }

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Tipene Hughes

Zendesk Developer Advocacy

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

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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!

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Tipene Hughes

Zendesk Developer Advocacy

Hi Lilian Herman,

You could use something like this to dynamically grab the translated content based on the browser language:

const lang = navigator.language

`/api/v2/help_center/${lang}/categories.json`

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.

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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.

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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.

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Christine Diego

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Stefano Nguma,

I will be creating a ticket on your behalf to further check your issue. Thank you!

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Gustavo Oliveira

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Dmitry,

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,

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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


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Hiedi Kysther

Zendesk Customer Care

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! 

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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.

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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!

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Sabra

Zendesk Customer Care

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! 

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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 :-)

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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

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Hiedi Kysther

Zendesk Customer Care

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! 

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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.

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If I have my help center localized to French and the default language is US English, and I have a link like so:

https://example.zendesk.com/hc/articles/123123123

And the following conditions are met:

  • The user is navigating the French version of the help center
  • The signed-in user has a French language preference
  • The user's browser is set to a French locale

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?

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