My company is moving to Confluence for all of its technical documentation, users' guides, knowledgebase, and the like.
Much of our content is available in multiple languages. English, Japanese, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Korean, German, soon to add Portugese and Italian. You get the idea.
We're having difficulty in finding a good way to display this content in a way that keeps each language associated with others of its kind.
Currently, English is our primary language (and represents 85% of our user base). English articles are displayed, with other languages as child pages of the English page.
Unfortunately, this means that a Japanese-speaking customer doesn't have an easy path from his Japanese User Guide to the Japanese Knowledgebase.
Making this more difficult is the fact that management wants to keep the English documents available to users in all languages. Most of our work is done in English first. New KB articles and updates are always in English before they get translated. Management wants all users to have access to English docs easily.
We've had a few ideas:
1) Create a new space for each language:
- Pros: Every document for a language is with all others of its kind.
- Cons: Access to English documents is somewhat restricted.
2) Keep all documents in a single space. Create a parent page for each language, make all documents children of that parent page:
- Pros: Easy access between languages, logical organization
- Cons: Search may return duplicate entries for un-translatable English phrases/names/terms/etc. Page names can get really long (Product Name User Guide - English - v4.3) which makes lists of content look cluttered.
How do you handle your documentation in multiple languages? Using something similar to the above?
Any examples would be greatly appreciated.
