You can provide your customers with a completely localized (translated), user experience. This includes all the words in the user interface as well as your knowledge base content.
Zendesk automatically provides localization of the user interface, including translation of default system fields. For the Description field, Zendesk automatically translates the default customer-facing description. If you change this value and don't use dynamic content, the description will not be automatically retranslated.
Zendesk also provides the means to host and present your translated articles. You can also display custom snippets of translated text on your help center pages. For example, you may want to add a welcome message on the home page or a company tagline in the header.
If you haven't already done so, you need to first enable multiple language support and then build out the structure of your localized versions, as described in Localizing help center content.
This article covers the following topics:
Authoring and managing your knowledge base content
There is an easy-to-use editor and content management tools to create knowledge base articles directly in Knowledge admin. When you choose other languages to support, you can easily create language-specific versions of your articles. A container article is created for you, but you must provide the translated content to insert into them. See Localizing help center content.
You can author your articles directly in Knowledge admin using the editor and you can also view and edit the underlying HTML source of those articles. See Editing the source code of help center articles.
For many Zendesk customers, the editor and content tools available in Knowledge admin are sufficient for creating and managing knowledge base articles. However, when you decide to start supporting other languages, your choice of a translation provider and the processes that come with that choice may affect what tools you’ll use to author and manage your knowledge base content.
The biggest challenges involved with managing translated content is getting the content to and back from the translation service provider, publishing the content, and then keeping it up to date — and, do all that with as little manual work as possible.
With those challenges in mind, let’s look at your options for managing your knowledge base content and translations.
Your options for managing content translation
As you saw in the previous section, you can easily create the containers for additional language versions of your articles. However, unless you have a staff of in-house translators, you need to find an external resource to do the translations. That means finding a way to get your default language content to and back from those external translators.
- Use AI translations for articles, available with the Copilot add-on, to quickly create article translations from within the article editor. If your help center is configured to support multiple languages, you can use the AI translation tool to quickly and easily populate an article with translated content. AI translations for articles supports all languages currently supported by Knowledge.
- Find a translation service that provides a Zendesk integration. Many cloud-based translation services are available to help you manage and translate your knowledge base content, working directly in Knowledge admin. These are end-to-end solutions that do not require you to create any custom tools or do any programming with the help center API. You'll find several translation services that you can integrate in the Zendesk Marketplace.
- Create your own integration and translation handoff process using the Help Center API. The means by which the translation agencies are able to integrate with Zendesk are available to you to create your own homegrown automated translation tools. The Zendesk Documentation team uses an implementation of the Help Center API to process our translations, and so do a number of Zendesk customers. You can use the Zendesk Help Center API to automate the management, handoff, and publishing of all your knowledge base content. Some programming skill is required to use the API for this purpose.
- Use a manual process for managing and handing off content. This isn’t the ideal way to handle translations, but if you don’t have much content it may work for you. A number of Zendesk customers use this approach so we include it here as well (see Managing your translations manually). This approach doesn't scale well, but may help you get started before you move to a better, more integrated solution.
Managing your translations manually
Many Zendesk customers start by authoring and maintaining their knowledge base content in Knowledge admin, and then when they start supporting other languages, find that they need to develop a manual process for handling their translations. This usually means using a spreadsheet and sending that file to their translation agency.
- Creating a spreadsheet with a column for each language you support
- Moving your default language content into the spreadsheet
- Handing that spreadsheet off to a translation agency
- When the translation agency hands it back to you with your translated content, copying and pasting the translations into the language variation versions of the default language articles
- Using the article editor to apply any formatting, if necessary
- Publishing the translated versions of the articles, one at a time
Because the article editor allows you to access the underlying HTML of your articles, you may want to copy those source files into your spreadsheet and hand them off to the translation agency, especially if you’re using custom formatting and your own CSS.
With a manual approach like this, you also need a process for keeping track of changes that you make to your default language article content and then make sure that those changes are routinely sent to the translation agency to make sure that your language versions don’t get out of sync.
You can mark translated versions of articles as being out of date; therefore, needing an updated translation (see Marking a translated article as out of date).
As you can imagine, this approach is time consuming and becomes very difficult to manage when your knowledge base grows. This is why we recommend that you choose an integrated translation solution instead. If you’re already using a translation agency that doesn’t offer a Zendesk integration, the Help Center API is an excellent option for automating handoffs and managing your article translations.