Subcommunities & Knowledge Base
This feature requires the Product Integration to be enabled.
Knowledge bases can now be assigned to subcommunities through a shared product. After enabling products and linking subcommunities to them you will find a "Product" dropdown menu in the knowledge base add/edit form.
This can be used to link a product. That knowledge base will then be available in all languages, and all subcommunities of that product.
Knowledge Base users can also use Machine Translation services to translate KB articles.
In order to use this feature, you will need to have Subcommunities, the multilingual addon, as well as Knowledge Base enabled. Additionally you will need to be subscribed to one of our available service providers - Google Translate or DeepL Translator.
What Does This Process Do?
It allows you to add and edit translations for each KB article. Additionally it will add a drop down language selector on every translated KB article:
Your KB will have the same number of entries as before, following the same organization structure in each language, it will just serve up different content, depending on which subcommunity is being viewed. This allows each translation of an article to have the same post ID as the original article - which is important for maintaining the organization of multiple subcommunities.
Another way of explaining this process is that it creates one KB that lives in one spot, has one set of articles, has one layout and structure, but speaks multiple languages - depending on who's talking to it.
It is possible to use this process with machine translation, or with client-provided translations.
What Does This Process Not Do?
This process does not allow you to connect a KB written in one language to an existing, separate KB written in a different language.
How To Set Up a KB For Translation
1. Navigate to the “Language Settings” section of your dashboard and turn on locales for each language you want to translate your KB into:
2. Under Subcommunities turn on "Enable Product Integration" and add a product to represent the translation. In the example below we’ve called the product “Translation” for simplicity:
3. Set up a subcommunity for each language. Make sure to set the Product field to the product you just created (“Translation”)! Every subcommunity that you want a translation for should use the same product.
4. Add the “Translation” product to the Knowledge Base you want to translate. You can do this for any number of KBs, just remember that you will only need to create the content (KB / articles) once and add the translations to that original content.
5. Click the translate button on the KB settings window to translate the KB titles for each locale.
6. Provide translations for each KB article. Translations can be added manually or using Machine Translation (with either DeepL or Google Translators):
Manual Translation:
To manually translate an article, start on the article page in the primary language.
Click on the drop down beneath “Other Languages” and select the language you would like to translate. You will see a red exclamation point beside any languages that are missing the translation (such as “Francais” in the image below:
You will now be viewing the same article in the new Language subcommunity. You should see a message (in the new language) letting you know how to update this version of the article:
Click on the three dots on the top right corner of the article and select “Edit” (translated version):
Add in the translated version of the article and click Publish.
You will now see the translation of this article linked to the original language article.
Machine Translation:
Configuring Google Translate
To configure Machine Translation you will need a Google Translate API key. Once you have this, go to the Machine Translation tab and edit Google Translate, and enter your API key:
Configuring DeepL Translator
To use DeepL, you will need to have a DeepL API Pro account. To enable the optin submit a request to our Support team or via your CSM to have this enabled. Once enabled you can configure this service using your DeepL Translator API Key. DeepL offers more advanced configuration options so you can add:
- Words to ignore while translating
- HTML/XML tags to ignore while translating
- HTML/XML tags to cause splits
Once you've configured your service provider(s) you then have the option to configure which service to use per language. Go back to the Localization Tab and edit your enabled Language Packs and select the service provider you would like to use. Choose "None" if you do not wish to use Machine Translation for a specific language and you'd like to manually translate your content.
Translating Articles
Now that Machine Translation is set up, you can start translating articles.
- Go to your KB, and find an article you would like to translate.
- In the Options menu, select "Machine Translation" this will launch a modal.
The modal will show you all the languages you have configured for this KB, and the articles translation status for each.
- Not Translated indicates the article requires translation to be made available in that language.
- Up to date indicates the article has been translated and is aligned with the source locale
- Out of date indicates the article has been translated in the past, but the source locale has a recent update that may not be reflected in the translation.
To translate an article that is Not Translated or Out of Date, click the "Translate" action button. Once the article has finished translating it will automatically be published.
Here is an example of a single KB with several translations. It speaks four languages - German, English, French, and Spanish. We don't need to create another KB for those languages, because this one contains them all:
