Localizing a theme

For information about how to translate article content, please refer to Zendesk’s article about localizing help center content.

Translating text in theme settings

Our themes allow you to define various text prompts that are seen throughout the help center using theme settings. By default, these text prompts are defined in English, however you can can translate them into multiple languages using Zendesk’s dynamic content.

Your help center languages are enabled independently of any languages you have enabled in Zendesk Support. This can have implications if you’re using dynamic content within your theme, so you must ensure that the language names in Zendesk Support match those being used in Zendesk Guide exactly.

To start using translations throughout your theme:

1. Enable translations

   Enable translations in your theme by activating the Use translations theme setting in the Translations setting group. This will make the theme search for dynamic content for all text prompt settings.

2. Create dynamic content

   Create dynamic content items for all text prompt settings in the theme. Each dynamic content item should contain translations, or variants, for each of your supported languages. Once created, every dynamic content item will have a corresponding placeholder.

   For example, a dynamic content item with the title “Hero Heading” should have a placeholder of {{dc.hero_heading}}.

3. Update the theme settings

   Replace the default English text prompts in each theme setting with a reference to your dynamic content placeholder.

   For example, to use the “Hero Heading” dynamic content as your Home page hero section heading, you would set the Hero heading setting value to hero_heading.

Translating text in page templates

In addition to the text defined within theme settings, every theme also displays translated text provided by Zendesk using the translation helper. Translations are available for each locale in your help center and the appropriate one will be automatically displayed to your visitors.

For example, the title of the New Request page is added to the page using the following code:

<h1>
  {{t 'submit_a_request'}}
</h1>

These text prompts cannot be modified directly, so if you want to change what visitors see you’ll need to replace them with dynamic content. Once the dynamic content exists, you can use the dynamic content helper to replace the default heading text in your New Request page template:

<h1>
  {{dc 'new_request_page_title'}}
</h1>

Because dynamic content is being used, the translated variant of the text changes dynamically based on the user’s language.