Creating and managing translated content for your Zendesk Guide knowledge base

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20 Comments

  • Efrat Barak

    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

    0
  • 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!

    0
  • 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.

    -1
  • CJ Johnson

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

    1
  • 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. 


    0
  • CJ Johnson

    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 The system returns 0 articles not translated to English, because I guess an unpublished draft technically exists? 

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  • Bri 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 I believe what you're saying is that if an unpublished draft exists for a translation, then 'Not translated to' filters the article out, acknowledging the draft as a translation.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.
    0
  • Jean Larkin

    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.
     

     

    0
  • Yahor Darashkevich

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

    0
  • Josine Pentin

    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?

    0
  • Dave Dyson
    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?
    0
  • Jen Hutton

    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?

     

    1
  • Rebeca Hernandez

    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.

    0
  • 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.
    0
  • Rebeca Hernandez

    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?

    0
  • 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. 

    1
  • Rebeca Hernandez

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

    0
  • Molly Exten

    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?

    0
  • Daniela M.

    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?

    0

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