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In what language do my help center articles display to my customers?



Edited Jan 20, 2023


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Hi there!

 

Our localization practice for hyperlinks that point to HC articles is to provide the URL of the en-us article (our default language), but remove the “en-us/“ portion from the URL. This way, it adapts to the user's browser language. For example, this is what we would suggest to embed in the UI of our product:

 

https://retail-support.lightspeedhq.com/hc/articles/228841987

 

To our understanding, the expected behaviour once the user clicks on the hyperlink and is directed to the HC should be the following:

 

  • If the user’s browser language is supported in the HC (e.g. FR) and the article is translated to their language (e.g. FR), the article translated to their preferred language will display automatically (e.g. FR).
  • If the user’s browser language is supported in the HC (e.g. FR) and the article is not yet translated to their language (e.g. FR), the article in the default language will display automatically (in our case, en-us).
  • If the user’s browser language is not supported in the HC (e.g. Bulgarian) and the article is therefore not translated to their language (e.g. Bulgarian), the article in the default language will display automatically (in our case, en-us).

 

However, we’ve seen inconsistent behaviours in our testing:

 

  • If the user’s browser language is supported in the Help Center (FR) and the article is translated to their language (FR), the article translated to their language will sometimes display the article in the default language (en-us) instead of their preferred language (FR). However, if the user manually selects their preferred language from the Help Center’s language drop-down (FR), the next time they click on the hyperlink, they will see the article in the language of the browser (FR) as expected instead.
  • If the user’s browser language is supported in the Help Center (FR) and the article is not yet translated to their language (FR), the article in the default language will not display automatically (en-us). Instead, they see an “Oops” page. Some users, however, successfully see the article in the default language automatically (en-us).
  • If the user’s browser language is not supported in the Help Center (Bulgarian) and the article is therefore not translated to their language (Bulgarian), the article in the default language will display automatically (en-us). This seems to be consistent to the expected behaviour compared to the above flows.

 

Have you heard of other ZD Guide users having these inconsistency issues? Is there a better localization practice than the one outlined above to be sure we create an experience that is consistent and works as expected in all our supported and non-supported languages?

 

Thank you very much!

Very Best,

Laetitia

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Sabra

Zendesk Customer Care

Laetitia Bonaldo! Thanks for such a thorough explanation of your current workflow and what you've seen during your testing. The behavior you are seeing is consistent with the expected behavior described in this article: Understanding how translated content is displayed in your help center. There are many variables that play a role in determining what language an end user sees when they access your Help Center by default. This article describes what those variables are: What determines the Help Center language that users see?

To prevent users from seeing the "Oops" page when using your current workflow of excluding the locale from your URLs, we do recommend considering one of the following solutions:

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