Plan requirement
| Subscription | Suite Growth or higher, Knowledge Professional or higher |
| Access | Agent, Admin |
Zendesk can flag a translation as outdated, so the drift you have to track by hand is smaller than it looks. What it does not have is a built-in bulk export and import of article translations, which shapes how you send work out.
Flag a translation as outdated
- Open the article and click Edit article.
- Click the globe icon on the collapsible panel and select the language.
- Click Options, then Flag.
The translation is marked as Flagged so anybody opening it knows it needs updating. Do this in the same sitting as the source edit, while you still know what changed. You need to be a Knowledge admin or an agent with publishing permissions.
The other options on that menu
| Set as default | Moves that translation to the Default language section; the rest sit under Additional languages. |
| Delete | Permanent. You cannot recover a deleted translation, and to delete the default language version you must set another as default first. |
Translate the structure before the articles
A translated article whose section or category has no translation in that language cannot be viewed by users at all, even though it is published. For bulk work that makes the order non-negotiable: categories and sections first, then articles, or you will publish a batch nobody can reach.
Four routes when the volume is real
| AI translations | From inside the article editor, article by article. No integration work. |
| A translation service with a Zendesk integration | Available through the Marketplace, and the route that scales without you building anything. |
| Your own integration | A translation handoff built on the Help Center API. |
| A manual handoff | Spreadsheets and a process of your own. Zendesk names it as a route, which is honest: for a small language or a one-off batch it is the cheapest thing that works. |
There is no built-in export of article translations to a file, so "send the spreadsheet to an agency" is a process you assemble rather than a button you press.
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.
Change the source in batches
If a term or a screen name changes across forty articles, fix all forty in the source, flag the affected translations, then hand over one 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.
Comments
0 comments
Article is closed for comments.