Languages & translated content
Translations tool will help you keep track of pages and documents in multiple languages.
Why translation matters
Language accessibility is an essential part of making sure your organization’s content is serving all of its audiences. If your organization has pages and documents in multiple languages, it can be difficult to keep track of them all in the CMS - especially if those pages or documents change or are updated frequently.
With the Translations tool in the CMS, it’s easy to link pages and documents in different languages to better keep track of them.
The tool functions similarly for pages and documents and is available on content types that have a language field. The Translations tool is available on all Documents and in Curated Lists, Form Pages, How-Tos, Information Details pages, Service Details pages, and News items.
Here’s how it works.
Step 1: Publish your English page or document first
You will link pages and documents in non-English languages to your organization’s English original, so it is important to draft or publish the English version before the other ones.
Step 2: Prepare your translated pages or documents for publishing as normal
It will probably be most efficient to have all of your page’s language translated before you start drafting in the CMS.
Step 3: Select the page or document’s language
For a Mass.gov page, there will be a new dropdown menu under the “Overview” section in the edit menu where you can select the page’s language from a list. If the language you need is not in the list, you can use a ServiceNow request to ask that it be added.
English will be selected by default, so if you are publishing an English page or document, you don’t need to do anything.
For documents, the Language dropdown is located under the Organization(s) field.
Step 4: Link your page or document to the English version
Once you select a non-English language from the dropdown list, a new field called English version”will appear. Use the autocomplete tool to find and select the English page or document.
Once you've done that for your non-English versions of a page, they will all show up under the Translations tab so that you can find them easily.
Language bar
When translated pages are linked via the Translations tool, a language bar displaying links to the translated versions will automatically appear near the top of that content.
The language bar does not appear for documents.
Display links to documents in multiple languages
If a document’s Language and English version fields are filled in, then when a document is added to certain fields on a page, links to all its language versions will display as well.
This will display in the Additional Resources and Downloads sections found in many content types, including Events, How-tos, Information Details, and Services. This will also work on Binder Appendixes and Curated List document links.
Documents will not display this way when linked in rich text fields.
This document display with language links can make your page designs more streamlined. You’ll no longer need to publish pages to list a series of documents in different languages.
Use the “Non-English Documents” report—accessible via a tab on the main navigation bar--to identify non-English versions of documents that are not linked to English versions.
Was this article helpful?
Last updated
