Managing translations in bulk

Plan requirement

Subscription Suite Growth or higher, Guide Professional or higher
Access Admin

Handling translations for many articles at once, and keeping track of which ones have drifted from the source.

Find what is missing

  1. Open the article list in Knowledge.
  2. Filter by language.
  3. Compare against the source language to see what has no translation.
  4. Export the list if you are sending work out.

Order the work by readership

Not alphabetically, and not by section. Translate the twenty most-read articles first and a large share of readers in that language are served. The long tail can wait, and some of it should wait indefinitely.

The hard part is not translating

It is knowing which translations have gone stale. Editing a source article leaves its translations untouched and unmarked, so a knowledge base can look complete in four languages while three of them describe last year's product.

Track this deliberately: a note of what changed and in which language, kept wherever your team already works.

Change the source in batches

If a term or a screen name changes across forty articles, fix all forty in the source, then hand over one translation job. Trickling changes through produces forty small translation tasks and a permanent backlog.

Publish a language when it is ready

A language switched on with a third of the content translated gives readers a help centre that appears mostly empty. Better to hold it until the core is done, then open it.

See also

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