Multilingual variant of a page

In the previous article, you’ve read about how the multilingual works in Xperience by Kentico. Now, you can start translating the pages as needed.

Translating your company website helps you reach a broader audience and provide a better user experience, which leads to higher conversion rates.

Let’s see how to translate a page into your targeted language.

Create a new language variant of a page

1. Localize untranslated pages

When translating a page, you need to know which one to pick so you don’t work on something that has already been done. Xperience by Kentico shows you the translation status at first glance. Just switch to the target language using the drop-down selector in the top left corner and see the icons next to the pages in the content tree:

• The alphabet sign means the page is not translated.
• The pencil says the translated page is in draft but has not been published yet.
• The green tick sign tells you the translated page is published.

2. Create the language variant

When creating a language variant of a page, you’re preparing a base for the content you’ll translate later. You need to take care of things in the background before you prepare the content visitors see when they visit your website.

a. Think about SEO

SEO properties are an essential part of the translated page. Adjusting SEO properties to the targeted language supports the page in search engines, so the target audience can find it easier. On the other hand, not translating the SEO properties could promote the translated page to the audience of the fallback language.

To provide an example, if your company has the main website in English and decides to add a Spanish version but keeps the SEO properties in English, the English audience can find the pages in Spanish. At the same time, the Spanish audience may miss the translated pages, and the number of visitors and potential conversions will be lower.

In our Kbank example below, we only changed the SEO title.

b. Add Open Graph content

If your company is active on social media to promote content, translate the Open Graph fields as well. If your developers implemented a custom connector app to your social media profiles, filling in the OG properties create a social media post, both the headline and the text, in the desired language.

c. Adjust the URL

URL is the next important thing you need to consider. If you leave the URL as is, which you can see in the example below, the URL includes the language prefix. Still, the URL slug is the same as it was in the original language. You can adjust the URL slug to match the page’s targeted language.

d. Check other fields

You may have other fields to think about based on your project implementation in your Xperience application. Some fields are not text fields, so they don’t need to be translated, but it’s good to think about them.

For example, on our Kbank demo site, we have the Page publish date. You may want to decide whether to keep it the same as the original page or use a different date.

3. Save the page

Now that you have translated or adjusted all the fields, save the page. You can then go to the Page Builder tab and start translating the page’s content.

Next steps - Translate the product

As we mentioned above, the Kbank page we use in this example has a product page with the product linked directly to the page. This means we’ll translate the product into the Content tab. For other content items, we’ll switch to the Page Builder tab.

We’ll look into translating the content itself in the following article Multilingual variant of a content item.