Multilingual content translations

Content translations are automated in Simpplr and powered by Google Translate. As your users become more globally distributed, flexibility to have manual translation of content is a core demand. Content publishers can now add manual translations into all available languages for pages they own. This allows users to overwrite any edits over the Google automated translation, save them, and use the same single piece of content to target viewers of multiple languages.

What are we solving?

• Users will have the ability to allow their content to be published in multiple languages with multilingual editing capability

• Users can now make any correction or edit on the auto translated content

• This will help users not to publish duplicate content in different languages, causing more unnecessary content

• Legal requirements of Canada to provide both French and English versions of content

Note:

Manual translation is enabled only for pages. Albums and events do not have this feature.

Who is this for?

Users who can publish content: app manager, site manager, site owner, content manager, users having manage site permission by additional roles.

Users who consume the content - All users

Drivers:

• Customer upside: Enables content management a seamless and more engaging process

• User delight: Helps content writers to author a single content and manage translations to target multilingual users

How does it work?

Content translation is driven by Google translate and can be enabled from Manage application > Content translations. This is not a new change; we have simply improved the help text and label for the setting.

Key points to remember:

• Though we are now allowed to add manual translation for each enabled language for a page, the fundamental concept of content management and publishing is not changing.

• The page is still one single entity and all its translations are attached to it.

• If any action is taken on the page be it from any of its translations, it will be applied to the entire page. That means, when we save as a draft, the entire page is getting saved as a draft.

• Similarly, when the page is unpublished, reaches its validation period, that happens to the age not individually to any of its translations.

Now we will see how in each step of content publishing workflows manual translations come into play. 

Create page and save as draft:

• While creating a page for the first time, users can enable manual translation. This will need to be done on a content-by-content basis. Default state for this is always disabled.

• Once manual translation is enabled and saved, the language selection field will appear at the top right corner which will allow users to change the language of the page and add manual translations if required.

  • This language selection dropdown contains the languages enabled in the system.

  • If any language is disabled at system level it will also be disabled form here.

• From the language selection, users can select any of the enabled languages and land on the specific language screen with auto translated content. Initially this screen will be view only, where the user can validate the machine-translated content and then can decide if that needs to be manually translated.

• The view only screen shows Page title, cover image, image caption and content body.

• Upon edit translation, Page title, image caption and body can be editable.

• The main page content can be referred via the link provided at the top bar which will open the main page in a new tab.

• User can change go to any of the translation pages via the language selection but each time any changes made to any translation need to be saved, which we inform the user through pop-up modal.

• We can also fall back to auto translation at any point of time for any language but we do save all the manual translations added by user in the version history.

• If user has saved manual translation at least once, changed to auto translation and again tries to go back to manual, we always show the last saved manual translation, so that user can reuse the old edits.

• While adding content into the page, if at any time the translations are out of sync with main page, we do show to user which fields are being updated in main and need attention in translation.

• As explained in above steps, users can create content, enable manual translation and save as draft. If a customer has multiple translators available, all the translations can be added in the draft state and then the page can be published.

Publishing pages:

• When we have manual translations added to a page and we are proceeding to publish it, we show some publishing modals based on the status of the main content and its translations.

• If significant changes are being made user can select the option here and proceed to following step.

• In the above screen user is again prompted which translation has manual translation and is not updated after the main is edited. So that user here can take a decision to do any of the following to the translation.

  • Keep the last saved French translation and publish

  • Cancel the process and go back to edit mode to amend

  • Fall back to manual translation for French

Schedule a page for a future date:

• We can create a page, add manual translations as explained before and schedule the page to be published in a future date.

• The scheduled page can also be edited and saved as draft, translations can also be added in this draft version.

Edit a published page and save:

• As we can save drafts on a published page also, while updating a published page user can add manual translations if required or edit the manual translations if already available, save as unpublished changes.

• Until the page is published again, the drafts saved for any of the manual translations will not be updated.

Unpublished changes to pages: 

Edit a published page and schedule for a future date:

• We can also edit a published page, add manual translations as explained before and schedule the page to be updated in a future date

• This scheduled page can also be edited and saved as draft, translations can also be added in this draft version

Page view details:

• Page view will show the language dropdown for every user now so that user can select any language and read the page

• Default language on the page view will be user’s profile language

• Page is translated automatically or manually will be indicated in the page

Version history:

• Any of the manual translation is saved for a page, a new version gets added to the version history

• In order to bring clear distinction between which language translation is updated in the draft, we have added language to the draft versions

• We have also introduced changes to version history labels, more details in the below table

Legacy status	New status
created page	saved draft (if save is clicked) published page (if publish is clicked)
updated page	published changes
saved draft	saved changes(language)
updated page (when scheduled for future)	scheduled page

Notifications for mentions:

• Any user can be mentioned from any of the translations, and notifications(in app, email, mobile/browser push notifications) will be to the corresponding users

• User will be notified in which language he has been mentioned 

• When user clicks any notification of any translation which is not user’s profile language, he will be redirected to the specific language page

• When user clicks on an aggregated notification, it will be directed to the 1st language copy in the notification

• App level and user level notification settings will be considered

Content validation:

When validating a knowledge page by any of the following means:

• from the validation bar in content details page

• from Manage content > Validate or Content details option menu > Validate

And the content has manual translations available, we show a prompt that the content is having manual translations and all of them will be validated together.

Ghostwriting:

• Changing the author of the page can only be done from the main content

• When author of a content having manual translations is changed to a protected author we will be informing to the user that translators must be in the allow list of ghostwriting so that they can make amends in future

Reference of content from video files:

• For videos being added in single language or multiple languages of the content, the reference is always one in the file preview screen.

• When a user clicks on the reference:

  • Same video added in all language -> user will land in their own language page

  • video added in profile lang + other language -> user will land in their own language page

  • video added in non-profile language ->  user will land in the non-profile language page

  • video added to multiple non-profile language -> user will land in the first mentioned page

Users can now see content in their profile language by default:

• Users now can see the content details translated automatically in their profile language without having to click on any link.

• We are also providing all the languages available in the platform in the content details page so that user can view the content in any language they wish to

• This translation can either be by Google translate or the manual translations added by content managers

• This change is done for all types of content - Pages, events and albums

FAQs:

Q: How do we enable manual translation?

A: Content translation needs to be enabled at application level by an app manager, and the content writer has to enable the option while creating a page.

Q: Do the translations have their own content lifecycle?

A: No, translations are attached to the main language and act as a single entity.

Q: Do all content types (events and albums) support manual translation?

A: No, we are supporting this only for pages.

Q: Which languages are available for translation?

A: All the languages enabled in the application are available for adding manual translation.

Q: What happens if we do not add any manual translation for a language?

A: The page falls back to the Google automatic translation if no manual translation is added.

Q: What happens if manual translation is added and the language is disabled at the app level?

A: The translation is also disabled from the page but we do not delete them from the system, if enabled again user will be seeing the last published manual version.

Q: Will other features like Newsletter, Home dashboard, and Search use the manual translations?

A: In the Phase 1 release (25.01), no downstream features will use manual translations. We will be supporting additional features in future releases.