Question
How does the help center determine what language to display for an article when a user accesses the Help Center?
Answer
Every web browser has a language setting that is automatically detected when a user visits the help center. If the article was translated into that language, the help center displays the article in that language. If the language is not supported in the Help Center, the default language is used. For example, if someone has their browser language set to Swahili and your help center does not have Swahili as a supported language, they'll see the article in the default language.
For more information on how content is served in the help center, see the section: Understanding how translated content is displayed in your Help Center.
2 comments
Laetitia Bonaldo
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:
However, we’ve seen inconsistent behaviours in our testing:
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
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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