Multilingual variant of a product

Translating your content gives users a smooth experience and prevents the pages you create from mixing different languages. It also helps your pages perform well both on the surface (what visitors see) and behind the scenes, supporting areas such as SEO and accessibility in the markets where you operate.

Xperience by Kentico translates content automatically using AIRA-powered translations. Triggering AIRA on a page translates the page’s own content and cascades through every linked content item, so you rarely need to type out a translation by hand.

If you work with content in the Content hub and display it in channels such as pages or emails, the following steps show how to translate reusable content. We’ll use a product page and a content item stored in the Content hub, where most reusable content is maintained.

Translate the content

Let’s see where you can find the content you need to translate. There are two main groups of content you could be translating on your site: reusable (or structured) and unstructured.

Xperience stores the reusable content in the Content hub, and you can link it to as many places as you want (if the chosen widget supports the content type). Content hub is also the default place to store any reusable media and assets you upload, since the standalone Media library feature has been retired.

Unstructured content is used in a specific place, and your team can reuse it elsewhere, but only with considerable effort. As for the translation process, AIRA translates text, long text, and rich text fields wherever they appear. On the page itself, in its Page Builder widgets, and in any linked content items, including items linked to those items (like the product’s Benefits and Features). Triggering the translation once, on the page, cascades through all of it.

You’ll see both content groups translated in our example Kbank TravelGuard Insurance page: unstructured Page Builder widgets sit directly on the page, and a product content item is referenced from the Content hub.

A few things still might need a manual touch-up after the automated pass, however. Some taxonomy tags aren’t translated automatically, links inside rich text need a manual check to make sure they point to the correct language variant, and forms must be translated separately in the Forms app (AIRA currently does not support form translation).

1. Find the untranslated content

How can you tell which content has not been translated yet? You don’t have to search the item by item; the page you’re translating will tell you right as you switch to the target language variant:

As shown in the example below, untranslated content items – like the product item we’re translating in our example – are also marked as untranslated content in Content hub.

If you hover over the “not translated” label, Xperience informs you that the item has not been translated. You can also see a small Not translated icon next to the label. If you publish the page now, it will show the product content item in the fallback language.

2. Translate the product with AIRA

You have two options when translating a product item. You can either translate it along with the product page where the item is referenced, or you can translate the item alone, directly from Content hub.

Translate the product page

In Kbank’s Personal Banking channel, open the TravelGuard Insurance page and switch the language selector to your target language to create the new variant. Then select Translate using AIRA.

This single trigger cascades the automated AIRA-powered translation through the following:

• The page’s fields and Page Builder widgets (including unstructured content, such as the Page heading widget).
• The product content item referenced by this page.
• The items linked to the product, such as Product benefits and Product features. You can choose which linked items to include in the translation before confirming, but we recommend keeping all of them selected.

Because several items are being translated together, the request is sent for processing to the Translation queue. This may take some time, especially if the product has many linked items. But you can keep working on other tasks while the translation finishes in the background.

Translate the product item

In case you need to translate the product item as a standalone, you can do so directly from Content hub. Locate your item, use the language selector to switch to the desired language, and open the item to access the translation dialogue.

After choosing the Translate with AIRA option, follow the same process as you would with a product page. Keep linked items selected for translation, and wait for the translation to finish.

3. Review the translated product

Once the translation is ready, you can check the results:

• in a product widget on the page itself,

• and in the product content item in the Content hub.

AIRA aims to produce a natural, ready-to-publish translation, but it’s good practice to review it and manually adjust anything AIRA couldn’t process before you publish. For example, taxonomy tags in the product, links inside rich text fields, or any custom field types your developers haven’t configured for AIRA translations are candidates for a manual review.

4. Think about additional settings

Based on your project implementation, there may be additional settings you’d need to pay attention to. For example, the Kbank demo site shows that editors can use the taxonomy feature to specify a language region, so visitors see the language variant of the content. It’s an example of a product content item marketers may find useful when promoting their products to multilingual audiences.

5. Publish the product and its linked items

Don’t forget to publish the new language variant you just created and translated. When you publish the product page, the cascade publishing dialogue opens and lists every linked item that isn’t published yet, including the product content item and its own linked items. These are listed but not selected by default. Use the multi-select checkboxes at the top of the list to select them all before confirming.

Once published, the Not translated label changes to Published for the page, the product, and every linked item you selected.

6. Preview the result on the live page

Finally, check that the page and the product display correctly in the target language by previewing the live TravelGuard Insurance page.

To sum up

Remember that your webpage contains data that is not directly visible when you preview the web page. Page SEO properties, such as title or description, or image alt tags, all play an important role in how your multilingual content performs on the target market. Triggering AIRA once on a page cascades through its widgets and every linked content item, but always review the result, and manually finish anything AIRA couldn’t process (like taxonomy tags or links inside rich text fields). And don’t forget that publishing still requires you to manually select the linked items in the cascade publishing dialogue.

Lastly, but most importantly, any parts of the reusable content items you haven’t translated will appear in the fallback language variant if your project relies on fallbacks, or won’t show at all if no fallback variant exists. The unstructured content has no fallback language variant.