Your community’s interface can default to one of dozens of languages through our Language Settings feature.
- Your selected default language impacts your community's navigation, menus, and system text for users who haven’t chosen a personal preference.
- In addition, languages enabled on the Language Settings page tie into other aspects of your community, which you'll learn about in this article.
Set a community default language
1. Access the Dashboard.
2. Navigate to Settings > Technical > Language Settings.
3. Your current default language is indicated in the Default Language dropdown. To change it, select another language.
NOTE: There's a delay when selecting a different default language, and you may need to refresh the page to notice the change.
Enable languages
The Language Settings page features dozens of language options. Scroll down the page and toggle on any languages you want available as a community default in the Default Language dropdown. If there's a language you want to use that's not displayed in the menu, you must enable it first.
The languages enabled here tie into other aspects of your community as well. Refer to the section below to learn more.
What happens when you enable a language?
Apart from making it available as a default language option, as you learned above, enabling a language also:
- Exposes it as a locale option for Knowledge Bases
- Makes the language available for UI/“Multilingual” interface switching
- If the Multilingual addon is enabled, any languages you enable in Language Settings become choices users can pick in the community footer to translate interface elements (navigation, labels, menus) into their preferred language.
- These language options only appear to logged-in users, and their selection is remembered for future logins.
- This affects interface text only, not user-generated content.
- Makes the language available for KB translation & machine translation workflows
- For manual or machine translation of KB articles, you first enable the languages you want to translate into via Language Settings.
- Once enabled, you can assign a Translation Service Provider (e.g., Google Translate or DeepL) per language and use it as a target language in the Machine Translation modal for KB articles.
- Enables that language in other language-aware features (e.g., email templates)
- Email Templates can store localized Subject/Body/Footer text for each of your enabled languages. When a user has a preferred language, the system uses that language’s version; otherwise it falls back to the community default language.
Supported languages
Click here to see the full list of supported languages.
Multiple languages
If you’d like to use more than one language, check out the article below.