Configuring your help center to support multiple languages

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Verified AI summary ◀▼
Configure your help center to support multiple languages by enabling desired languages and adding translated content. Users can select their preferred language, enhancing accessibility and user experience. Manage language settings independently from other support languages, and easily update or remove languages as needed. Ensure your knowledge base delivers content in supported languages to provide a comprehensive multilingual experience.



If you are not on a Suite plan, you must have Guide Professional or Enterprise
and Support Professional or Enterprise for multi-language
support.
You must enable all of the languages that you want to support in your help center.
For each language you enable, you can add a translated help center name as well as
translated snippets of text. Your help center languages are independent of any
languages you have enabled in Zendesk Support.
After you enable languages for your help center, you can add localized help center content) so that end users
can choose the language they want in your help center.
You must be a Knowledge admin to configure help center languages.
This article covers the following topics:
Enabling languages for your help center
Understanding how translated content is displayed in your help center
Removing a help center language
Changing a translated help center name


Related article:
Configuring the default language
for your help center




Enabling languages for your help center

You can enable any help center languages you plan to support.
You can choose from any of the help center supported languages
and most of the languages that are available by
request. If you choose a supported language, text that appears
in the help center by default (for example, "search" and "comments"), is
displayed in that language. If you choose a language that is not supported,
default text appears in that language only if there are crowd-sourced
translations.
Note: If you are not planning to translate all your articles
into a chosen language, make sure your content will be displayed
correctly to all users, see Understanding how translated content is displayed in your help center.

You need to set up your knowledge base to deliver content in your supported languages
for your enabled languages.
Your help center languages are enabled independently of any languages you have
enabled in Zendesk Support. If you enable a
language for your help center that is not enabled in Support, when
that language is selected in your help center, the "Submit a request" form
will appear in the Support account default
language.
To enable a language in your help center

In Knowledge admin, click Settings ( ) in the sidebar.
Select Language settings, then click Add new
language. You can scroll or search the list. You can
choose from any of the help center supported
languages and most of the languages that are
available by request, some of which have
crowd-sourced translations.

Click the Language drop-down to select a language, then enter a
Help Center name for the language. The help center name
might be the translated name of your default help center
name.


Click Add language.
Click Add new language again if you want to add more
languages. A list of all your enabled languages appears on the
help center Language page. If you've enabled multiple
languages, the Help Center name should be the name of the search
source.


Click Save on the help center Language page when you are
finished. Next, you need to set up your knowledge base to
deliver content in your supported
languages, if you haven't already done so.






Understanding how translated content is displayed in your help center

The difference between having a language enabled and having translated content
available for that language has implications on what a user sees in a help
center. For example, the default language for a help center might be set to
US English (en-us). The help center might also provide translated content in
French (fr).
The
language that a user sees in your help center is based on defaulting to the
following, in order of preference:


The language specified in the URL of the page the user is
currently on (if present)
The language set for the user's current active session
The language preference set in the user's user profile
The preferred language of the user's browser
Other compatible languages specified by the user's browser


If the help center is unable to match any of these languages, then the user is
directed to the default language of
your help center.
These examples explain some different scenarios.



Scenario 1 - The user's browser language is a language that
is not enabled in the help center. The user sees the article in
the default language. That is, a user with Polish (pl) set as
their default browser language accesses this link: https://support.zendesk.com/hc/pl. The site is not
translated into Polish so they are redirected to the
default language site (support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us), and will see
the content in English.


Scenario 2 - The user's browser language is a language that
is enabled in the help center, and there is translated content
in that language available for that article. The user
automatically sees the translated content. That is, if a
user's default browser language is French, they see all
articles that have been translated into French, even if
the user has not specified the locale (fr) in the URL. If
they access the link https://support.zendesk.com/hc, they are automatically
redirected to https://support.zendesk.com/hc/fr.


Scenario 3 - The user's browser language is a language that
is enabled in the help center, but there is no translated
content in that language available for that article. The article
will not show up in the browser language's version of the help
center. If the user tries to navigate manually to that article,
in a language that it has not been translated into, then the
user sees a page error, or is redirected to the home page for
that language. For example, a user with French set as their
default browser language sees all articles that have been
translated into French, but if any articles are not
translated, they get a message that the page does not
exist. This is because the fr locale has been set up, but
is not populated for every article.



In all examples, if a user wants to manually change the language that they view
an article in, then they must specify a different locale in the URL or
change the language in the help center language drop-down menu. If the
language is enabled in the help center, and has translated content available
for that article, they'll see that content.
For example, if you type the URL https://support.zendesk.com/hc/de, you'll see German content for that
page, regardless of your default browser language. Specifying a locale in
the URL does not change the language in which you are browsing the help
center. To browse the help center in a different language, you must use the
language drop-down menu.
If you provide only some of your content in other languages, consider one of
the following solutions:


Redirect untranslated
articles to an existing language
Add a default language version of the article to the translation
page. In our example, this would mean copying the English
article into the French translation page. See delivering content in your supported
languages.





Removing a help center language

You can disable any language you have enabled in your help center by deleting
it in the help center Languages page. When you delete a language, help
center articles in the deleted language are unpublished, but remain in Guide
admin. If you add the language back in, the related content will be
republished.
To set up your help center for multiple languages

In Knowledge admin, click Settings ( ) in the sidebar.
Select Language settings.
Click the options menu beside the language you want to remove, then
click Delete.
The language is
removed from your list of languages, without a confirmation
dialog. You can enable it again if necessary by clicking Add
new language.

Click Save on the help center Language page when you are
finished.




Changing a translated help center name

You can add a translated help center name when you enable a language. You can
easily change the help center name for a language at any time.
To change a translated help center name

In Knowledge admin, click Settings ( ) in the sidebar.
Select Language settings.
Click in the name field for any language, then enter a new name.

Click Save on the help center Language page when you are
finished.



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