Community Pages Localization in Salesforce: Part 2
This is the second part of a series of blog posts about Community Pages localization in Salesforce. In the first part, we covered the localization features from the Community Builder. In this second part, we’ll cover some topics related to Translation Workbench.
The Salesforce Translation Workbench is a feature that helps you translate content present in Salesforce. This not only applies to Community Pages, but also to standard objects, labels and customizations.
To use this feature, go to Setup > User Interface > Translation Workbench. As part of this feature, there are five different functionalities, which we will describe below.
Export
This feature allows you to export all the translatable strings within Salesforce for translation. There are three options here:
- Source: a single file containing all the translatable strings.
- Outdated and untranslated: a set of files by language containing translatable strings whose text changed after the last translation (outdated) and all the strings that are not translated yet (untranslated).
- Bilingual: a set of files by language with all the translatable strings.
You can also select the format for these files (STF or XLIFF). Typically, XLIFF is the most standard format used for localization.
Based on my experience working on Community Pages localization, I found that this export is a bit hard to use. Basically, the granularity here is low, as you cannot select which components or sections you want to export. This causes the file to be huge, as it contains all the translatable strings in Salesforce, including labels from Salesforce itself. This requires additional effort, as you need to identify which strings correspond to components from your Community Pages.
Import
This feature allows you to import the translated files from the Export feature. I found that you can remove all the strings you don’t need translated. In other words, you can keep only the translated segments and remove the rest. This will allow the tool to only import the segments that are needed.
This helps to speed up the process of importing and tracking any errors. This feature generates a log with the results once it finishes and having less segments helps to check the log easily and spot any issues.
One recommendation here is to make sure you have the proper language code in the files before importing. Sometimes we tend to reuse files from other languages and that can cause the language code to get the translation in the wrong language.
Override
This feature can be used to override existing custom labels for English or any other target language.
Translate
This feature allows you to apply translations directly through the user interface. You need to select the language and the component and that will show you the existing labels. After selecting these values, the screen will show you the labels on a grid and will allow you to enter and modify the translation.
Translation Language Settings
In this section, you will be able to add new languages and activate them. If you need Community Pages localization, I recommend you enable the target languages here as well, as you may need to translate some strings by using Workbench.
Conclusion
If you plan to apply different language versions for your Community Pages, keep in mind that you may need to use both the Community Builder and the Translation Workbench. There are many components that cannot be translated from the Community Builder and they will need to be translated using Translation Workbench. Even though it can be complex to use, I recommend using the Export and Import features, and preparing a subset of the strings from the files, so your linguistic team can easily help with your Community Pages localization projects.
