Localize Trails and Modules

Learning Objectives

After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:

• Describe how users experience an enablement site in multiple languages.
  
• Explain how content teams collaborate to translate content.
  
• Explain how published content is affected by adding translations.
  

Enable Users in Other Languages

English is the default language for all parts of the enablement site experience. By default, Trailmaker Content encodes all content as English. When a release manager publishes content, they publish content in English. When learners find and complete content, they find content in English.

But the world is a big place! Your learners might prefer content in another language. To help drive adoption for all your users around the world, you can localize enablement site content into any of these languages.

• English
  
• French
  
• German
  
• Italian
  
• Japanese
  
• Korean
  
• Portuguese (Brazil)
  
• Simplified Chinese
  
• Spanish (LATAM)
  
• Spanish (Spain)
  

On your enablement site, a user can select one of these languages from the dropdown in the footer of any page.

Selecting a different language shows localized labels throughout the enablement site user experience: tabs, search, points, completion time, content types, and so on. However, the content itself—titles, descriptions, and unit text—remain untranslated until you localize and publish content for that language. 

Trailmaker doesn’t provide a UI for localizing content. In Trailmaker Content, your writers can author content in any language they want, but Trailmaker still encodes the content as English. For example, if you write content in German and publish it, and then a user selects English from the language dropdown when viewing your enablement site, they see your content that was written in German. Your writers may have used German words and grammar, but your enablement site still thinks your content is in English.

To ensure that users see the appropriate translations only when they select a specific language, localize the files in your content backpacks. In previous units of this module, we saw how a content creator downloads backpacks for content, saves them to a version control system (VCS), and makes them available for other collaborators. For example, a release manager can import a backpack into her own Trailmaker Content workspace in order to add the content to a release and publish it. Similarly, you can hand off backpacks so that your content can get localized.

To help illustrate this process, let’s check in once more with Cindy, a content creator at Pure Aloe, who’s helped write and publish trails and modules in English. Now, Cindy’s manager approaches her with a request: Pure Aloe wants to localize the Sell Well at Pure Aloe trail into Japanese and Portuguese (Brazil). No problem!

Collaborate with a Localization Team or Vendor

To add localized content for a supported language, work with a localization team at your company, or contract the services of a localization vendor. As we saw in the Enablement Site Basics module, a localization team or vendor isn’t necessarily part of your regular content creation team, but they can be an important dependency.

Pure Aloe, a small company, contracts with a vendor for localizing their enablement site content. Cindy, the person most familiar with the words that are being localized, serves as the Pure Aloe contact for the vendor.

Deliver English Source Files

Cindy’s first task is to make sure that the localization vendor has access to the English content. She starts by locating the backpacks for the latest versions of the content to localize: 

• Sell Well at Pure Aloe trail
  
• Pure Aloe Sales Strategies module
  
• Pure Aloe Competitors module
  
• Pure Aloe Sales Goals module
  

She adds the backpacks in a secure location that the vendor can access, and lets them know that the files are ready to be translated. For example, she can give the localization vendor access to the VCS where the backpacks are saved.

Translate the Appropriate Content

There’s a lot of information in a backpack, and not every file is translatable. To make sure that users can enjoy a fully localized experience, ask your localization team or vendor to translate this content.

• Trail titles and descriptions
  
• Module titles and descriptions
  
• Unit headings and text
  
• Unit images, if they contain text
  
• Unit quizzes
  

Videos are a little different. Typically, a video hosting platform publishes a localized video to a different URL than the original video. To make sure that your localized content references the localized video, ask your localization team or vendor to update the video’s embed URL in the localized unit. 

Your localization team or vendor follows their own process for localizing content.

• Many localization teams and vendors use computer-aided translation tools that protect HTML, JSON, and YAML code from being edited. The translator can change content values, but can’t modify any tags, attributes, or other underlying code.
  
• If your localization team or vendor doesn’t work with such software, they can use a text editor that shows the code. However, they must take care to avoid editing code.
  
• Avoid word processors for translation because word processors can insert code artifacts that can make future edits and translations more difficult.
  

For more detailed information about backpack structure and specific files to localize, we recommend that you and your localization team or vendor review the Salesforce Help topics, Backpacks for Trails and Modules and Guidelines for Localizing Files in a Backpack.

Review the Updated Backpacks

When they’re finished, your localization team or vendor returns the backpacks to the same secure location where the backpacks were first accessed, such as your company’s VCS. The backpacks they return are now updated with language-specific subfolders, where each folder is named with the appropriate locale code for the language, such as ja-JP for Japanese. 

We recommend that you carefully review the backpacks you receive to make sure that the localized file structure is correct, and that translations are complete. Recall that Pure Aloe wants to localize the Sell Well at Pure Aloe trail. When Cindy receives the backpacks from the localization vendor, she makes sure that:

• She receives a backpack for the trail.
  
• She receives a separate backpack for each module.
  
• Each backpack contains ja-JP and pt-BR subfolders in the appropriate locations.
  
• Each module contains localized content for every unit.
  

Incomplete translations can affect how users view the localized content. Because English is the default language, it serves as the fallback for any part of the user experience that isn’t properly localized for a selected language. If you localize only some units in a module but leave other units in English, the entire module falls back to English. For example, maybe you translate a module with three units into German, but the localization vendor accidentally doesn’t translate one of the units. When a user selects German, they see the entire module in English. To make sure that the full localized module is available for a selected language, work with your localization team or vendor to fix the localized backpack.

Cindy can optionally import the backpack into her Trailmaker Content workspace, and verify that the English source hasn’t been changed during the localization workflow.

When you import a backpack that contains localized files, Trailmaker Content still shows the content in English only. If you preview an imported module from Trailmaker Content, the preview shows only English content. But don’t worry! The translated content is still attached to the backpack—it just doesn’t appear when you view the content in Trailmaker.

Publish Localized Content

A release manager can make the translated content available to users by adding the updated backpacks to a release and publishing it. Here’s how Pure Aloe completes this process.

1. Cindy notifies Marisol, the release manager, that the localized content is ready.
   
2. In Trailmaker Release, Marisol creates a release.
   
3. Marisol retrieves the backpacks with localized content from the VCS, and imports them into her own Trailmaker Content workspace.
   
4. Marisol adds the content to the release she created.
   
5. Marisol previews the release and verifies that the correct translations appear when selecting a different language.
   
6. Marisol shares the release preview URL with SMEs from the regions that the content was localized for. For example, to validate that correct translations appear when selecting Japanese or Portuguese (Brazil), Marisol can find SMEs from those regions to perform some quality assurance testing.
   
7. Marisol resolves errors and publishes the release.
   

Now, when a user visits the Pure Aloe enablement site, they can access content in another language. Because Pure Aloe added only Japanese and Portuguese (Brazil), here’s how the user experience changes based on the language they select.

When you publish localized content, you’re adding languages to trails, modules, and units. But you’re not increasing the number of trails, modules, and units that you’ve published, and you’re not changing or adding API names for your content. For example, after Marisol publishes the localized backpacks, there’s still only one Sell Well at Pure Aloe trail, and only three modules. There aren’t three different versions of the Sell Well at Pure Aloe trail, nor three different versions of each module. 

Because localized content is still just one piece of content that’s available in multiple languages, you can’t publish different languages for the same content to different content collections. For example, Pure Aloe can’t publish the English version of the Pure Aloe Sales Strategies module to one collection and the Japanese version of the module to a different content collection. You can create language-specific content for each audience, but you use separate modules, published in separate releases.

In this module, Cindy and Marisol have been doing a lot of work to help execute the Pure Aloe enablement strategy. In the module Trailmaker Release Basics, we’ll learn more about how Marisol creates, manages, and publishes releases.

Resources

• Trailhead: Enablement Site Basics
• Trailhead: Trailmaker Release Basics
• Salesforce Help: Backpacks for Trails and Modules
• Salesforce Help: Translate Enablement Site Content to Other Languages
• Salesforce Help: Examples of Content Collections