Creating and managing translated content for your knowledge base

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<p id="docs-hc-snippet" style="display: none;">You can provide your customers with a completely localized (translated), user experience. This includes all the words in the user interface as well as your knowledge base content.</p>
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<p class="p">You can provide
your customers with a completely localized (translated), user experience. This includes all
the words in the user interface as well as your knowledge base content.</p>
<p class="p">Zendesk automatically provides localization of the user interface, including translation of
default system fields. For the Description field, Zendesk automatically translates the
default customer-facing description. If you change this value and don't use dynamic content,
the description will not be automatically retranslated. </p>
<p class="p">Zendesk also provides the means to host and present your translated articles. You can also
display custom snippets of translated text on your help center pages. For example, you may
want to add a welcome message on the home page or a company tagline in the header.</p>
<div class="p">In this article, we explain how you might set up and manage the authoring, translation,
publishing, and updating of your knowledge base content.<div class="note note">
<span class="notetitle">Note:</span> Managing translated content in
your business rules and support ticket workflow is handled by a feature in the Admin Center
called <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408882999066" target="_blank">dynamic content</a>.</div>
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<p class="p">If you haven't already done so, you need to first enable multiple language support and then
build out the structure of your localized versions, as described in <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408834328090" target="_blank">Localizing help center content</a>.</p>
<p class="p">This article covers the following topics:</p>
<div class="p">
<ul class="ul" id="topic-1__ul_lgj_2zn_3qb">
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_v3b_zfd_v3">Authoring and managing your knowledge base content</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_r1f_4gd_v3">Your options for managing content translation</a></li>
<li class="li"><a class="xref" href="#topic_wcm_dy2_2db">Managing your translations manually</a></li>
</ul>
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<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title2" class="topic nested1" id="topic_v3b_zfd_v3">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title2">Authoring and managing your knowledge base content</h2>
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<p class="p">There is an easy-to-use editor and content management tools to create knowledge base articles
directly in Knowledge admin. When you choose other languages to support, you can easily
create language-specific versions of your articles. A container article is created for you,
but you must provide the translated content to insert into them. See <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408834328090" target="_blank">Localizing help center content</a>.</p>
<p class="p">You can author your articles directly in Knowledge admin using the editor and you can also
view and edit the underlying HTML source of those articles. See <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408824584602" target="_blank">Editing the source code of help center articles</a>.</p>
<p class="p">For many Zendesk customers, the editor and content tools available in Knowledge admin are
sufficient for creating and managing knowledge base articles. However, when you decide to
start supporting other languages, your choice of a translation provider and the processes
that come with that choice may affect what tools you’ll use to author and manage your
knowledge base content.</p>
<p class="p">The biggest challenges involved with managing translated content is getting the content to
and back from the translation service provider, publishing the content, and then keeping it
up to date — and, do all that with as little manual work as possible.</p>
<p class="p">With those challenges in mind, let’s look at your options for managing your knowledge base
content and translations.</p>
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<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title3" class="topic nested1" id="topic_r1f_4gd_v3">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title3">Your options for managing content translation</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">As you saw in the previous section, you can easily create the containers for additional language
versions of your articles. However, unless you have a staff of in-house translators, you
need to find an external resource to do the translations. That means finding a way to get
your default language content to and back from those external translators. </p>
<div class="p">Here are your options — in order of recommended approach.<ul class="ul" id="topic_r1f_4gd_v3__ul_w3r_c43_gfb">
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Use <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/8717609637018" target="_blank">AI translations for articles</a></strong>, available
with the <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/5524125586330" target="_blank">Copilot add-on</a>, to quickly create article
translations from within the article editor. If your help center is configured to
support multiple languages, you can use the AI translation tool to quickly and easily
populate an article with translated content. AI translations for articles supports all
languages currently supported by Knowledge. </li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Find a translation service that provides a Zendesk integration</strong>. Many
cloud-based translation services are available to help you manage and translate your
knowledge base content, working directly in Knowledge admin. These are end-to-end
solutions that do not require you to create any custom tools or do any programming with
the help center API. You'll find several translation services that you can integrate in
the <a class="xref" href="https://www.zendesk.com/marketplace/" target="_blank">Zendesk Marketplace</a>.</li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Create your own integration and translation handoff process using the Help Center
API</strong>. The means by which the translation agencies are able to integrate with
Zendesk are available to you to create your own homegrown automated translation tools.
The Zendesk Documentation team uses an implementation of the Help Center API to process
our translations, and so do a number of Zendesk customers. You can use the Zendesk <a class="xref" href="https://developer.zendesk.com/api-reference/help_center/help-center-api/introduction/" target="_blank">Help Center API</a> to automate the management,
handoff, and publishing of all your knowledge base content. Some programming skill is
required to use the API for this purpose. </li>
<li class="li">
<strong class="ph b">Use a manual process for managing and handing off content</strong>. This isn’t the ideal
way to handle translations, but if you don’t have much content it may work for you. A
number of Zendesk customers use this approach so we include it here as well (see <a class="xref" href="#topic_wcm_dy2_2db">Managing your translations manually</a>).
This approach doesn't scale well, but may help you get started before you move to a
better, more integrated solution.</li>
</ul>
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<div aria-labelledby="ariaid-title4" class="topic nested1" id="topic_wcm_dy2_2db">
<h2 class="title topictitle2" id="ariaid-title4">Managing your translations manually</h2>
<div class="body">
<p class="p">Many Zendesk customers start by authoring and maintaining their knowledge base content in
Knowledge admin, and then when they start supporting other languages, find that they need to
develop a manual process for handling their translations. This usually means using a
spreadsheet and sending that file to their translation agency.</p>
<div class="p">This is a manual process and involves the following steps.<ul class="ul" id="topic_wcm_dy2_2db__ul_mly_fy2_2db">
<li class="li">Creating a spreadsheet with a column for each language you support</li>
<li class="li">Moving your default language content into the spreadsheet</li>
<li class="li">Handing that spreadsheet off to a translation agency</li>
<li class="li">When the translation agency hands it back to you with your translated content, copying
and pasting the translations into the language variation versions of the default
language articles</li>
<li class="li">Using the article editor to apply any formatting, if necessary</li>
<li class="li">Publishing the translated versions of the articles, one at a time</li>
</ul>
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<p class="p">Because the article editor allows you to access the underlying HTML of your articles, you
may want to copy those source files into your spreadsheet and hand them off to the
translation agency, especially if you’re using custom formatting and your own CSS.</p>
<p class="p">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.</p>
<p class="p">You can mark translated versions of articles as being out of date; therefore, needing an
updated translation (see <a class="xref" href="https://support.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/4408821505306#topic_3dr_lgh_cy" target="_blank">Marking a translated article as out of date</a>).</p>
<p class="p">As you can imagine, this approach is time consuming and becomes very difficult to manage
when your knowledge base grows. This is why we recommend that you choose an integrated
translation solution instead. If you’re already using a translation agency that doesn’t
offer a Zendesk integration, the Help Center API is an excellent option for automating
handoffs and managing your article translations.</p>
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