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Language usage in Confluence

Fabienne Gerhard

Hi community,

really hope for a productive discussion.

First of all, I wanna give you some background to understand what's currently haunting me:

We're using Confluence Server as Knowledge Base - a wiki for all employees. We have a 250 people license with 100 registered users. That's because when we started this project 1,5 years ago we looked for experts to work on topics and create content here in our german headquarter. Even that we have 15 different locations all around the world it was decided to use Geman as the only language. As you can imagine wiki grew pretty fast and new people came to the project.

As everyone was super excited and had new ideas - we opened Wiki to all employees (especially in production) which brings us back to the language problem.

Most of the starting users and people working in office speak pretty good german - but now coming to our colleagues in production it's getting hard. We definitly need 6 more languages for the spaces that are important for the production people (English, Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Chinese, Italian) - but they only have anonymous access to the Wiki as they won't create any content and don't have their own computers.

Now I want to know how you handle language in your confluence.

I'm testing addons like Scroll Translations, Language Manager and Language Switch, but I'm not sure what is going to work and what could work for us. Especially as we're using a programmed theme for the wiki that get's in conflict with some addons.

What would be awesome:

navigation in all languages - so that users can navigate more easily in their native language
user (and anonymous users) can choose the language which they want to use - even more comfortable would be if confluence would just use browser settings for language choose but you can still switch it (this also counts for the first point navigation)
an article that is available in your chosen language will be shown (other languages would be hidden), articles that are not available in chosen language would be shown in other languages available (most of the time it would be german, but for portuguese also english would be great before german)
when we update an article, the users that are responsible for the other languages would get information about that and vice versa

Now let me know:

Do you have an ideas on how to manage that?

What are your experiences on language addons?

What problems are you working on according language?

Pretty excited about your experiences - thanks in advance

Fabienne

Comments

Sloan N_ B_

All three add-ons can help you to archive your needs.

Additionally I can recommend the Language Add-on (disclaimer: bitvoodoo is vendor of this add-on, this is not intended as advertisement, just as recommendation). It enables you to have content in different languages on a Confluence page. Only the Content of the users Language is shown.

Language Switch for Confluence is the easiest way to let everyone (including anonymous users) change their language easily. So that even the navigation is in the wanted language, and not only in default or browsers language.

Take note that combining these add-ons does not go well. Except maybe for the Language Switch, this add-on could possibly work as addition to the other three add-ons.

Do you have an ideas on how to manage that?
- All four add-ons have a different approach. I suggest maybe do an evaluation of these add-ons and try them in a test space or a test Confluence instance.
What are your experiences on language addons?
- Ins Switzerland German, French and Italian are often needed simultaneously. So I had good and bad experiences in projects.
  It always relies on your content creators. They need to maintain the contents in all needed languages. I had experiences where we introduced multi language content but later on, no one took the time to translate pages, so everything ended up being in english or the default language (like German).

Cheers
Niklas

Davin Studer

I was just about to mention the Language Add-on but you beat me to the recommendation.

Davin Studer

Have you also considered Google Translate? You can embed their translator on your site in Confluence Admin -> Custom HTML.

https://translate.google.com/manager/website/

It bears mentioning that Chrome will auto translate pages if the language of the page does not match your language. While it's not perfect I have found browsing some German sites that the translation was decent enough that I understood the page ... my native tongue is English.

Fabienne Gerhard

Hi @Sloan N_ B_

thanks for your input - gonna try this out.

Language switch sounds very good - have to figure out how it works with our costumized theme.

All four add-ons have a different approach. I suggest maybe do an evaluation of these add-ons and try them in a test space or a test Confluence instance.

-> already workin on test instance

I really liked Language Addon - can you make it working together with Language Switch.
Any experiences about that, cause you mentioned it in your reply?
I'm a little bit unsure because we have really long articles in 7 languages but gonna give it a try. Hope it's not going to end in macro in macro in macro confusing look when editing.

Do you know if the notification function from confluence is working with Language Add-on? I'm seeing a problem here because you will only see the content in your chosen language. Will you get the notification that something has changed and will you see it?

Thanks for your help!

Fabienne Gerhard

Hi @Davin Studer

thanks for your idea too - that was also my first idea.

Doesn't work because our group policy blocks every access for the system to google. So no machine translation available. Another problem is that we have really very technical words that machine translation doesn't really work.

Thanks!

roman_l0djep

Hi @Fabienne Gerhard,

Scroll Translations — that you are already trying out — can achieve most (if not all) the points you mentioned in your original post.

When a new user accessed the space with Scroll Translations for the first time, his system language would be used to choose the the language that would be displayed. Next time this user switches the language, the app would remember this choice until the cookie expires.
If a page is not available in a certain language, it won't be displayed in the page tree.
If a translation is being done manually in Confluence, a translator would have an option to mark the translation as Complete or Not (yet) Complete. That way it's possible to see from the byline in which language the translation of this page is complete.

I am working for K15t, developer of Scroll Translations. If you would like a demo of the app, drop me a line at support@k15t.com.

Cheers,
Roman.

Sloan N_ B_

Hi again Fabienne

I misinterpreted Languages Switch's function. I think it won't work the way I thought with Language Add-on.
Here is explained how Language Switch is intended to use: https://confluence-apps.beecom.ch/display/LSC/Example
I assumed it changes the users language setting. But you will have to work with multiple pages and labels.

bitvoodoo's Enterprise Theme comes with a small language switch built in doing what I expected to happen. But honestly, just getting the Theme for this would be overkill!

Screen Shot 2018-06-20 at 14.22.23.png

Regarding notifications: Since Language Add-on works with macros, changes in each language Macro will trigger a notification (if not deselected of course). And depending on your notification settings the changes of whatever language will be shown.

Fabienne Gerhard

Hi Roman (seems like I'm not able to mention you....)

thanks for your help. Scroll Translation sounds good - didn't have the time for a real try. It's like every time we are in Tryout mode we stumble across a new problem.... sorry challenge

Does Scroll Translation work with anonymous users? Can they choose their language or how does it work?

If a page is not available in a certain language, it won't be displayed in the page tree.

Is there a possibility to show the page in a language where it does exist? (would be german in our case - for our collegues in Brasil it would be english, but that's the next step)

Another question is space names - can you also change them with Scroll Translation? Would be important for Navigation.

Thanks for your support

Fabienne

roman_l0djep

Hi Fabienne.

Yes, anonymous users can select the language in the Translations toolbar:

More information about getting started with Translations can be found here: https://help.k15t.com/scroll-translations/latest/get-started-125702642.html.

Currently there's no way to translate the space name itself. You can of course translate page titles of individual pages.

If you would like to have language specific space names, I'd recommend using Scroll Translations in combination with Scroll Versions. You can author and translate your content in a versioned space managed with Scroll Versions and Scroll Translations and publish each language to a separate space. Each space will then have a dedicated language specific space name.

You can find further information about Scroll Versions in our documentation (https://help.k15t.com/scroll-versions), or feel free to have a look at our YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptaP1m1MGvY.

Hope this helps. If you have questions, please let me know.

Cheers,
Roman.

Fabienne Gerhard

Thank you so muchRoman (still not able to mention you - always getting an html error )

- that sounds good!! Combination Scroll Translations - Scroll Versions works?

Pretty sure - I'm gonna come back for more information.

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