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Creating and managing translated content for your Zendesk Guide knowledge base



Edited Feb 07, 2025


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26 comments

The list of translation services is not updated and some of these companies are no longer working.

I would appreciate a recommendation for a company that can help in localize helpdesk to Hebrew

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Brett Bowser

Zendesk Community Manager

Hey Efrat,

Thanks for bringing this to our attention! I will pass this feedback along to our documentation team to see if we can get this list updated.

Cheers!

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Nova Dawn

Zendesk Documentation Team

Hi Efrat!
Thank you, I have updated the article accordingly.


If you are still look for  someone to do Hebrew translations, I can see that Translate Media can do this for you.

I hope you find this helpful.

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How do you manage identifying articles that have been translated in some languages but are missing others? 

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Madison Hoffman

Zendesk Digital Resources Team

Hey CJ! I'm late to the game on this question but Guide Admin will let you filter for articles that are not translated to your elected languages. Under the filter menu, select Not translated to and select a language. 


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Madison Hoffman Unfortunately, this seems to ignore the status of the articles. I know there's articles published in other languages, that are not published in English. The system returns 0 articles not translated to English, because I guess an unpublished draft technically exists? 

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Bry Fitzgerald

Zendesk Customer Care

Hey CJ! I'm grateful for your patience. I believe what you're saying is that if an unpublished draft exists for a translation, then 'Not translated to' filters the article out, acknowledging the draft as a translation. I did some testing, and was able to confirm what you're describing.




This makes sense to me, and I would deem this to be expected behavior, especially when paired with the logic of the 'Language' filter. I'm unable to come up with a feasible workaround. Your comment did generate a ticket, which I've marked as product feedback. I would also welcome you to share this feedback in our Community.

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Hi everyone.

Has anyone else had the issue of orphan articles due to manual translations? My team operations and offers help in English and Spanish.

We have all Categories (and 1 section per category) in Spanish and English. However by default, when you "add translation" to an article, the "category/section" is in the original language.

When I write an article in English, appropriately categorize it, and then translate it into Spanish, the Spanish article is put in an English category (and thus is not visible as Zendesk doesn't show a Spanish article in an English category). When I go in to just edit the Spanish one and change the Category to the Spanish Category... it says "this will affect all translations" -- and then it moves the English article to Spanish, rendering it orphan.

This makes absolutely no sense to me, as the point of a translation is to live in a separate different language category/section.

Help!!!

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Dane

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Jean,
 
The behavior you are currently experiencing is expected when it comes to how translations are stored. Translations are not designed to be accessed separately on the Help Center on the same locale. However, it will be visible to users depending on the language of the Help Center they are in. You don't have to move them manually to a different category/section but you need designate the translation of the same categories and section that they are currently in.
 
I have made a sample using English AU and English US. My default language is English US and created a translation, English AU. If ever that translation does not have a translated category and section it will give you this message.
 

 
What you need to do is designate the correct translation for the categories and section so that depending on the language your end-users are using they will still see the article once they switched locale/language.
 
The best demonstration for this behavior is with this actual article above. If you change from en-us to pt-br, you'll eventually be presented with the corresponding translated article.
 

 

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Is there a way to easily duplicate all content from, say, German Germany (de-de) into Austrian German (de-at)?

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Our Help Center supports multiple languages, but not all the articles are translated yet. What is the best practice for modifying the URL address of referenced articles, within an article?  Should we always remove the '/en-us' in the URL address, OR will Zendesk automatically display the article based on the user's selected language?

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Hi Josine,
 
Yes, just remove the locale string (e.g. "/en-us") from the URL, and your help center will detect the user's browser setting and display the translated article if available -- see In what language do my help center articles display to my customers?

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A similar question to Josine above: our guide is available in English as well as 4 other languages — localization is handled through Crowdin. When building the pages, we used the native linking tool in the article builder to link to other pages in the guide. However, the links on the localized pages are still en-us and so a user navigating a page in French, for example, will get bumped to the English version. 

Besides manually updating every single link to remove en-us, is there another way to ensure the links correctly map in their localized instances, i.e. so a user in the French instance will be able to navigate between pages in French?

 

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I am interested in the answer to Jen Hutton's question; we are handling our translations through Lingpad and would like to know what would be the correct process before we start pushing all the content from Lingpad to the Guide.

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Dane

Zendesk Engineering

Hi Rebecaa and Jen,
 
It will entirely depend on how these apps create articles in Zendesk. 
 
Our help center API have the capability to designate locales for each article that will be created. This way, you will not have to manually designate the translations. Unfortunately, it should also be utilized by the apps you are using to work. It's also an option to manually utilize these APIs for the articles to be designated on their corresponding locales.

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I was in a session where the Zendesk team explained that for translations, they have an approach of a mix of human translations and machine translations. How do you decide which articles should be done by real translators and which articles could be done by AI?

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Madison Hoffman

Zendesk Digital Resources Team

Hi Rebeca! Our audience predominantly uses our content in English and English is our source language, so we look at utilization of our content in English to try and understand which is being used most often. We typically follow the Pareto Principle that 80% of our traffic tends to be focused on 20% of our content, so we focus our human translation efforts/budget on the top 20% by pageviews in English. The bottom 80% are machine translatedIn addition, even the top 20% of our articles go through a machine translation process first so that a human is only cleaning up or editing the output. This helps control our translation costs. 

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Hi Madison Hoffman thank you very much for the detailed explanation. This helps a lot. 

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In the manual workflow, it says:

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.

However, in the first two approaches (Zendesk integration and help center API), I couldn't find any info on how these workflows handle updates to existing guides.

If you use a translation integration or the help center API, how do you handle updates to existing guides?

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We have been trying to find a better way to handle translations of published articles with  "in progress" status (currently, we're using a manual workflow for this type of request, which is not optimal).

In our team, "In-progress" articles are sent for translation only after our writers finish updating the source content of an existing article, but the updated content has not been pushed live yet.

We have in place the Zendesk connector for Smartling, which works well for new articles but can't handle the in-progress use case. Are we missing something? What would be a possible solution to handle this use case?

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I have the same question as Yahor above here, but his question hasn't been answered. 

One of my former colleagues has set two of our three help centers to the wrong version of English. We have three help centers, of which one is set to English UK (which is what we'd like to use), one to English US and one to English Netherlands.

This causes issues with for example dynamic content; we have to add all three versions of English here to get the correct translations to all Help Centers. It's also confusing as for end user languages it's not clear to which English we have to set their language. We want to use one version of English among all Zendesk Help Centers, Support etc. which should be English UK (en-gb).

I'm afraid I'm up to the task to manually create new translations in the correct English to each article and copy paste the content. Is there a way to 'easily' export/import articles and set them to a different language and solve this issue with less manual work?

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Sabra

Zendesk Customer Care

Hey Molly Exten! The workflow used to manage the default or source language article when using a translation integration or help center APIs is going to vary depending on the integration's functionality and abilities. For example, some integrations may have you make edits completely outside of Zendesk and have their own methods for handling updates to the other language articles that then all flow back to Zendesk Guide. 

Daniela M., one option that you may consider using is our flagging feature for translated articles: Flagging a translated article as out of date. I can't speak to how this functionality works with Smartling, but might be something to look into!

And Cheyenne, I think the answer to your question depends on what you consider "easy" :) Since we don't have an "import" option in Guide, we would need to rely on our APIs to do any sort of export/import at scale. You would need to all the current article content (with something like our List Article endpoint) and then create the corresponding translation with our Create Translation endpoint. You will also need to make sure that you set the correct source locale for your articles. If you have developer resources, this process may be something that they can assist with. That being said, using a third-party translation integration might be the easiest method in this case outside of doing it manually. 

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Hello! Is there a way to disable feedback ("submit a request") for just one of our locales? 

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Viktor Osetrov

Zendesk Customer Care

Hello Kinga,

Unfortunately what you want to achieve would not be possible without custom code since that is not the intended behaviour for the help center request submission system. 
 
However, with some clever JS script, this can be done.  The caveat being however, anyone with that knows the direct URL to the submit a request page and is logged into your platform, will be able to get to this URL, whether they are part of an intended, designated group or not.  In order to try and block these users, an additional custom script would be necessary to hide the form and show some custom text unless their profile has the requisite tags/org to allow them to submit tickets.
 
For the sake of transparency, I would like to clarify that in Support, while we are happy to troubleshoot default and script for any bugs or performance issues, the creation of custom code and troubleshooting that code is a little outside of our scope of support.

Thanks

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hello team, in the source of languages, what can I do to change the display name of the languages? Actually I want to change "Brazilian Portuguese" to "Portuguese (BR)", is it possible? Thank you 

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Jupete Manitas

Zendesk Customer Care

Hi Lucas, thanks for writing in! 
 
Are you referring to the Help Center name displayed on the help center home page? Because if correct, you can change the HC name in the guide admin. 
You can also refer here for your reference: Changing the name of your help center. Otherwise, please let us know or you may create a new conversation to support for a closer look. Thank you!

 

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