Launching International Sites on Kentico

Introduction

Launching international site in Kentico, a headless CMS can be accomplished by setting up multiple cultures, configuring the culture settings and leveraging translation services for configuring content for translation. Read further to dive deep into launching international sites on Kentico for users from different geographical locations.

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You can find a list of available cultures in the Localization application on the Cultures tab. All major cultures are provided by default. You can assign cultures to websites and translate the content to the respective languages.

Configuring multiple cultures for website

Open the Sites application and edit your site. You can assign cultures using the Add cultures button in the culture tab.

Now in the Pages application, you can see the culture option enabled below the content tree. You can switch to other languages as follows.

Configuring the default content culture

If we create a website based on a web template, the site uses the culture of the given web template. All default Kentico web templates use English - United States as their default culture.

We can change this default settings in 

Settings -> content -> Default content culture

Control user access for specific cultures.

Kentico allows you to control users to access specific language versions of pages.

In the Users application, select the user whom you want to control access. In the Language tab click on User can edit the following languages and click on add languages button to select desired cultures. Now the user can able to edit only the selected languages page in the page application.

Managing cultures

Users with the Global administrator privilege level can manage all cultures in the Localization application on the Cultures tab. To display only UI cultures, choose Yes in the Is UI culture filter and click Search.

Editing Multilingual website content

In the Pages application on a multilingual website, you can see the language selector below the content tree. Use the selector to switch between language versions of the currently selected page.

Creating multiple language versions of pages

In the Pages application. Select the root page in the content tree and switch to French culture. Since the French version of the page does not exist yet, you can create it through one of the following ways:

• Create empty page – creates a new page of the same type, but without any content.

• Copy content from another language – creates a copy of the page with content loaded from the   selected language version. If Save the new page before editing is checked, the system adds the new page version and immediately saves the copied content.

• Translate using translation service – with this option, the content of the page's new language version will be provided by an external translation service. See the Translating content using external services chapter to learn more.

Choose to Copy content from another language.

Select English - United States.

The French version of the root page has now been created. You can now translate other pages on the website:

Configuring translation services

You can automate or outsource the translation of website content using translation services. Translation services allow you to create multilingual sites without having to edit the text in the Kentico administration interface. The system automatically ensures the transfer of data between the website's pages and translation providers. Translation data is exported and imported via files using the standard XML-based XLIFF format.

There are two general categories of translation services:

• Machine services - use translation software to programmatically convert source text from one language to another. By default, Kentico supports Microsoft Translator and Google Translate. See Machine translation - Microsoft Translator and Machine translation - Google Translate.
• Standard services (human translation) - provide an automated interface between Kentico and external human translators. By default, you can use the Translations.com service. See Human translation services - Translations.com.

The main purpose of translation services is to create language versions of the website's pages based on the content in another language. There are several different ways to submit pages for translation.

Enabling translation services

We can enable the translation service functionality in the Settings application 

Select the Content -> Translation services category and Check Enable translation services.

 

 

Configuring content for translation

Translation services can process the following types of page content:

• Content of editable regions on Portal Engine pages
• Values of page fields (entered on the Form or Content tab of the Pages application)
• The properties of web parts and widgets placed on the given page
• Page file attachments (without their image variants)

 

Configuring page fields

To choose which page fields are sent for translation, Open the Page types application.

Edit the specific page type and switch to the Fields tab. Select the field you wish to configure and enable or disable the Translate field flag. Translation is only available for fields with the Text, Long text or File Data type.

 

Summary

Kentico is a great CMS for companies that have a multi-lingual audience and whose offerings serve a large base of cultures. Creating a great user experience includes having a website that can easily communicate with consumers in their language of choice. Kentico allows developers to build websites that span multiple languages and automatically adjust to users from multiple geographies and provides translation aswell. At Exemplifi, we work extensively with Kentico and other headless CMS and have built multiple websites using its versatility.

 

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