What is the recommended approach for internationalizing product documentation in Confluence?

[Greg Kullberg]

In addition to being able to localize the UI, how would one go about localizing page content?  Is the recommended approach simply a matter of creating multiple spaces for each language, or are there any plugins that make it easier?

[Ellen Feaheny [AppFusions] · Accepted solution]

Hi Greg - 

See https://wiki.ca.com. (Yes, that is Confluence, themed by AppFusions team.)

Here's a good example doc that you can click around, see translations, etc.

CA Technologies' are in the process of migrating thousands of documents covering hundreds of products. The solution uses AppFusions' Enterprise Translations Hub for Confluence, allowing the content to be in-platform machine translated (MT) into (up to) 100+ languages, on-demand, or as part of an agile "DocOps" process.

You can specify different translation engines for different languages, based on preferences. For example, maybe german uses Enterprise Google MT, spanish uses Enterprise Microsoft MT, and chinese and japanese use Asia Online, etc. 

Specific to the Confluence portion of the solution, the implementation includes:

• In-Confluence post-translation segment "workbench" editor (interactive and in-page) 
• Ongoing MT library "training" for continual accuracy improvements over time, 
• Configurable translation process workflows (i.e., professional, community, your own, etc.)
• Gliffy image translation support
• Support of a large plethora of common Confluence macros (and sustained/growing)
• Native compatibility with K15t's Scroll Versions, EPubs, PDF Exporter, Acrolinx (for language grammar) plugins
• "No-translate" word / phrase declarations
• Processing reports, automated multi-language support (as many as you want), space-specific translations or per-page translations, and more

By using Confluence as your product documentation agile creation and deployment platform, in addition to saving tons of $$ on very expensive professional translation fees over and over, the days of manual content export > translate > import > retrofit > repeat are over, with everything handled all from within Confluence. Bonus: every time you translate pages, SEO for your site is further optimized.

Note: The base solution of course does not require extensive theming and works with all the above features out-of-the-box. 

If interested to try it out yourself, email info@appfusions.com and we can get a trial going asap. Obviously, we are pretty fired up about the global possibilities for corps deploying this solution - and hope to hear from you!

Ellen

p.s. This customer is reference-able, and would gladly speak with you directly about their project and forward plans as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dVrTwdMAJxE

p.p.s.

AppFusions' also has a "lesser solution" to the content internationalization challenge - called SpeakMyLanguage Translations for Confluence (and for JIRA), I say lesser since it's for on-the-fly translations using Bing Translator, but as such, not "enterprise-grade" translations and there is no post-edit options often desired for product documentation where accuracy has a higher bar. 

SpeakMyLanguage meets a quick translation need between global offices for internal Confluence communications, and where general context of content is required vs. strict translation accuracy. For some corps, the former is enough.