The Complete Guide to Translating Your Zendesk Help Center

Global businesses face a critical challenge: delivering seamless support content in a customer's language. Your Zendesk help center may offer valuable information, but if customers can't understand it, they'll likely abandon self-service and flood your Zendesk support team with tickets.

Customers will always want content in their native language. As such, translating your help center isn't just good practice—it's essential for serving global users.

For this tutorial, we'll show you how to overcome these language barriers by translating your Zendesk app for improved customer experience, using Weglot.

Making Your Help Center Multilingual: The Foundation for Global Support

Your Zendesk help center is a global knowledge base rather than a translation or localization project. With the right implementation, a multilingual help center can become a powerful tool that can reduce support costs, improve customer satisfaction, and give you a platform to scale internationally.

However, this requires careful planning and the right approach to implementation. Translating a Zendesk help center presents distinct challenges that go beyond basic content translation:

• Dynamic content management. Your help center isn't static—it grows and changes constantly. When you update an article in your primary language, those changes need to flow through to all translations in real-time, quickly and accurately. This can quickly become complex with each additional language you support.
• Technical documentation complexity. Zendesk help centers often contain technical documentation with specific terminology, product names, and step-by-step instructions. These elements require precise translation to maintain accuracy while remaining understandable to users in different regions.
• HTML and formatting preservation. Help center articles frequently include formatted text, tables, code snippets, and embedded media. Your translation solution needs to preserve this formatting while adapting content for different languages—especially those reading right-to-left or requiring different character sets.
• Version control and collaboration. Multiple team members often contribute to help center content. Managing translations across a distributed team requires robust version control and clear workflows to maintain consistency and quality.

Thinking about all of these aspects forms a major part of your overall multilingual customer support strategy. As such, your multilingual help center's success will depend on more than quality translation, you’ll need a comprehensive translation workflow too.

Creating an Effective Multilingual Support Strategy

Some support articles may be more important than others, so while machine translation will likely form a major part in your strategy, you might want to prioritize some content over others for more precise translation. You can start by analyzing your help center traffic and ticket data to identify which content to translate first. We suggest you look into high-traffic articles and frequently referenced documents. Zendesk Explore will be ideal for this:

With this approach, you can maximize the impact of your translations while managing the costs more effectively. Something else that will maximize the impact of your entire strategy is which translation solution you choose. There are a few elements that yours will need to handle:

• Automatic content detection and syncing.
• Preservation of HTML formatting and dynamic elements.
• Search optimization for each language.
• Proper URL structure and language detection.
• Integration with Zendesk's article management system.

For your team, this solution will also need to be the hub for a number of quality assurance processes. For instance, you may want to review machine translations, maintain consistent terminology, handle updates and changes, and even test those translations before you publish them. This is where the choosing the right translation solution comes in.

Evaluating the Translation Solutions for Zendesk

The market offers several approaches to translating your Zendesk help center, each with its own strengths and specialized features. Understanding these solutions in depth will help you make an informed decision that aligns with your specific needs and capabilities.

We're going to present three solutions, although there are many more available. Let's start with our own software—Weglot—then look at two other options.

Weglot: Comprehensive Translation Management

Weglot has a seamless integration with Zendesk giving you a simple way to translate and manage yourcontent. At its core, Weglot employs content detection automation that identifies and processes all content and  elements of your Zendesk help center. This includes article content, navigation menus, dynamic elements, metadata and more. This comprehensive approach ensures no content is overlooked in the translation process.

While you can use the Translation list, and in many cases it will do the best job, the platform's Visual Editor lets support agents review and modify translations directly on their help center pages. This context-aware approach improves the speed in which you can make edits, improving translation accuracy and efficiency, as editors can see exactly how the translated content appears to users.

What’s more, on of its key features, a glossary, allows you to add complex technical terms into a library and choose how they’ll be translated across your site. This means you won't have to update every single phrase with these terms, and instead can set and forget through your own glossary, ensuring consistency across your Zendesk help center.

There are plenty of other ways Weglot can assist your translation:

• It handles technical SEO work on the backend. This includes user redirection based on language, adding hreflang tags where applicable, and setting the right URL structure and hierarchy for your help center.
• You get built-in collaborative translation tools, such as the ability to set members for your 'project'—in this case, your Zendesk help center.
• There’s no technical set up, install Weglot in minutes and your Zendesk help center is instantly translated with real-time translation.
• Continuous translation so any updates or new help documents you create are instantly translated, without having to manually push them for translation.

Weglot's pricing starts from $17 per month for a single language and up to 10,000 words. This includes the full feature set of the translation service too. There’s also a 10-day free trial—without a credit card required—so you can give it a go yourself.

Swifteq: AI-Powered Translation Platform

Swifteq takes a different approach to translation through leveraging ChatGPT's (OpenAI) capabilities for documentation translation. Their platform specializes in understanding technical content and maintaining consistency across large document sets.

This system excels at processing help center articles and preserving technical accuracy, while still maintaining a natural, helpful tone. For Zendesk users, Swifteq offers direct marketplace integration that streamlines the setup process.

It integrates directly with Guide articles, which provides immediate translation of both new and updated content. One useful feature is their support for partial article updates, which means you only need to translate modified sections rather than entire articles.

The platform's understanding of technical documentation conventions helps maintain accuracy in complex support articles. However, while the AI translation is sophisticated, it's still going to need manual review for highly technical or brand-specific content—even more so given that it's not using a dedicated translation engine.

Translate By Humans: Professional Translation Service

Translate By Humans takes a hybrid approach to translation, and combines professional human expertise with technological support. Its service connects you with translators who specialize in technical documentation and customer support content.

This human-centric approach particularly benefits companies with highly specialized products or services that require nuanced understanding.

The service integrates with Zendesk through an API, although there's also a manual option, which is flexible. The app's workflow system lets you manage your quality control with care, and lets you include multiple reviewers to ensure accuracy before content goes live. While human translation typically takes longer than automated solutions, it can provide superior quality for complex or sensitive content.

What's more, a translation memory tool helps you to maintain consistency across your content, while industry-specific teams ensure accurate translation of technical jargon. The service particularly shines when dealing with content that requires cultural adaptation beyond simple translation.

Setting Up Your Multilingual Help Center: A Step-by-Step Guide Using Weglot

Translating your Zendesk app is simple with Weglot.

1. Initial Setup and Configuration

We have a full tutorial on integrating Zendesk and Weglot, so here's a quick overview of this initial process:

• Sign up for a Weglot account.
• Choose Zendesk as your technology type.
• Select your primary language, and select the new languages you want to translate your site into.
• Setup and verify your DNS settings if applicable.
• Grab the JavaScript snippet and paste it into the document_head.hbs file within Zendesk. You can access this through the Edit Code screen within the Guide > Custom Design page.

Once the script is in place, click the Publish button. And that’s it! Your Zendesk help ernter is officially translated. You’ll see a language switcher has been automatically added to your Zendesk help center!

2. Content Detection and Initial Translation

Once Weglot has been installed, it automatically detects all translatable content within your Zendesk help center. This is done usingl machine translation from leading providers including DeepL, Microsoft Translator, and Google Translate.

You can now begin to edit your translations (if you choose to), which you can do through the Translations > Languages list within the Weglot Dashboard:

If you select a language, this will bring you to the Translations list:

Here, you'll find all of the detected content organized by page. This is where you'll review and refine translations line-by-line to ensure they meet your high-quality internal standards.

While the Translation list is a fantastic way to edit your content, the Visual Editor can help you review translations in context. It's essentially a backend tool to visualize your front-end display, and it will help you to see exactly how your translated help center appears to users. You can find this in the Translations > Visual Editor screen within the Weglot dashboard.

You can also create glossary rules to keep consistent translations of complex terms across your site.

3. Language Switcher Implementation

Weglot adds the language switcher without the need for your input. However, you also have a number of ways to customize this to your liking. The Settings > Language Switcher screen within Weglot gives you a few options to tweak the design fast:

At the bottom of this screen, you can drag-and-drop language into your preferred order. Clicking on an individual language will let you set options such as the local language name and flag:

However, the Switcher Editor lets you work with the design of your language selector as it appears on the frontend of your site. This way, you won't need any code or expertise to create a switcher that meets your requirements.

Common Challenges and Solutions

Running a multilingual help center comes with specific challenges that will require thoughtful solutions. Understanding these challenges helps you prepare for them effectively.

Let's look at a few of the more common roadblocks you'll have, and how to resolve them.

Synchronizing Original and Translated Content

Maintaining synchronization between your original content and translations represents one of the most significant challenges in help center management.

Ultimately, when support teams update articles or add new sections, these changes need to reflect accurately across all language versions. It's critical because outdated or inconsistent help content can lead to customer confusion and increased support tickets. Additionally, manually tracking your content's changes across multiple languages can become exponentially complex as your help center grows.

Weglot's automated content detection and change tracking system will create new translations across the multiple languages you run.

Formatting and Technical Content Preservation

Help center articles often contain complex formatting, including tables, code blocks, and technical diagrams. Preserving these elements while translating content presents unique challenges, especially for languages that read right-to-left or use different character sets.

The impact of poor formatting will extend beyond aesthetics, as technical instructions will be unclear or even unusable. This is particularly problematic for articles containing step-by-step instructions or code examples.

Weglot provides the solution here, as it preserves all HTML elements while translating content. This ensures that formatting, links, and technical content remain functional across all languages.

Quality Assurance and Consistency

Maintaining consistent terminology and tone across thousands of help center articles in multiple languages can be tough, especially for technical support content. Inconsistent terminology can confuse users and undermine their confidence in your support content. This challenge grows with the size of your help center and the number of languages you support.

However, Weglot provides a number of tools that can help here. For instance, you can establish a glossary of approved translations for technical terms or other phrases:

A similar piece of functionality is the translation memory. This will let you preserve the translations for portions of text—'translation units'—and Weglot can use those when it detects a similar pattern in the future. It's an excellent and powerful way to maintain translation consistency.

Measuring Success and Optimization

Creating a multilingual help center represents a significant investment, so it's important to measure its effectiveness and continuously optimize its performance. Understanding how your translated content performs helps justify the investment and identify areas for improvement.

You can start by establishing baseline metrics before launching translated versions of your help center. This is where you'll track key performance indicators such as the success rate by language, the time you spend on translated articles, navigation patterns in different languages, and more.

Again, Zendesk Explore will be essential here, but Weglot's analytics tools help you monitor some of these metrics too.

In particular, pay attention to search patterns and article engagement rates, as these indicate how well users can find and understand information in their preferred language.

Frequently Asked Questions

It's worth filling in some knowledge gaps you might have about using Weglot with Zendesk, and also revisiting some key aspects of the integration. Take a look at the following questions and answers—although you can always contact us to ask your own!

How does Weglot handle dynamic content in Zendesk?

Weglot automatically detects and translates dynamic content primarily through adding a JavaScript snippet to your Zendesk app. This will ensure all content remains synchronized across languages.

Can I exclude certain help center sections from translation?

Yes, Weglot will let you exclude specific URLs, content blocks, or phrases from translation through its dashboard settings. You can find it under the Content Exclusion link.

How do I handle brand-specific terminology?

The best way is to create your own glossary within Weglot to maintain consistent translation of brand terms, product names, and technical vocabulary.

What happens when I update an article?

Weglot will automatically detect any changes to your original help center and flag it for translation. This will help you ensure that all language versions stay current.

How can I test translations before publishing?

You can switch your site to private and view your translated Zendesk site in preview mode and choose to go live when you’re ready..

Conclusion

Translating your Zendesk help center is a necessary step towards providing excellent global customer support. While several solutions exist, Weglot offers the most comprehensive and user-friendly approach.

It offers automated translation of your entire help center's content within minutes, on a continuous basis. What's more, it combines this power with precise control over your multilingual content.

To make your help center multilingual, try Weglot free for 10-days and experience how professional translation can transform your customer support!