Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Growth or higher, Knowledge Professional or higher |
| Access | Agent |
It is invisible to readers in that language: not shown in another language, not shown at all. Which is kinder than showing them what they cannot read.
What the reader experiences
A Dutch reader browsing a Dutch help centre sees only the Dutch articles. An article that exists solely in English does not appear in their search, their sections or their categories.
From their side, that content does not exist.
Why it works this way
Showing an English article to somebody who chose Dutch would be worse in most cases: they cannot read it and it looks like a mistake.
The cost is that a partly translated help centre looks far emptier in the second language than the article count suggests.
What to do about it
- Translate the most-read articles first, not the easiest ones.
- Accept a smaller set per language. Thirty good Dutch articles beat two hundred half-translated ones.
- Watch searches that return nothing in each language. That tells you exactly what to translate next.
- Redirect the gaps, where a partial translation is the plan. Untranslated articles can be redirected to an existing language, or given a default language version on the translation page, rather than left as an error.
A direct link gives an error
Browsing hides the article; a link does something more jarring. Somebody navigating straight to an article that has no translation in their selected language sees a page error, or is redirected to the home page for that language.
So translating a linked group together is not tidiness. It is what stops a reader landing on an error from a link you wrote.
The trap: an untranslated section or category
This one costs people an afternoon. If you translate an article but its section or category has no translation in that same language, readers cannot view the article at all, even though it is published.
The article looks finished from the admin side and is invisible from the reader's. Translate the parent pages with the article, not afterwards.
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