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Your community should be as global as your business, but limited resources and the overplayed direction to “do more with less” make it challenging, if not impossible, to provide a localized experience that resonates across your diverse customer base. Traditional methods, such as segregating communities by language, have fallen short, leading to a fragmented user experience that diminishes user engagement and, consequently, the overall effectiveness of the community on a global scale.

Your community members, regardless of location and language, should feel welcomed and empowered by your online community, which is why we are proud to announce the launch of the new localized interface in Gainsight Customer Communities! 

 

A Step Towards Comprehensive Localization

The localized interface is a significant leap toward addressing the need for a unified and inclusive community experience. This feature allows admins and community managers to configure the community interface in up to 18 different languages. Your community members can then use the language selector to seamlessly translate the interface into their preferred language, creating a cohesive and inclusive user experience across the board.

We’ve also added extensive customization options to ensure that the interface not only speaks the user's language but also reflects brand identities and acknowledges cultural nuances across all supported languages. Our goal is to enhance user engagement by providing a localized experience that feels native to each user, regardless of their location or language.

 

What’s New?

  • Multi-language Support: Besides your default language, you can now set up your community interface in up to 17 additional languages, catering to a broad user base.

     

  • Language Selector: Enable users to easily switch the interface to their preferred language, promoting an inclusive community environment.

     

  • Customization and Brand Alignment: Customize the interface to align with brand identities and cultural nuances, enhancing the user experience and engagement.

     

This is just the first, but pivotal step, in our ongoing commitment to delivering a community platform that is truly global yet locally relevant. We're breaking down language barriers and building stronger, more inclusive communities by fostering an environment where every user can navigate, engage, and connect in their preferred language.

For more information on how to set up and customize the localized interface for your community, please refer to:

 

What's Coming Up Next

As we continue to enhance our localization capabilities, we are excited to share a glimpse into what’s next. 

 

Dedicated Categories for Different Languages

Soon, admins and community managers will have the ability to create dedicated categories within the Community and Knowledge Base modules for the different supported languages. This advancement means that community members can navigate and discover relevant content in their preferred language.

Enhanced Navigation and Content Discovery

With this update, community members will experience an interface that truly feels like it was made for them. Navigation and content discovery will be confined to the categories of their chosen language, streamlining their experience and ensuring that they are only presented with content that is accessible and understandable.

 

We’d love to hear from you!

We are dedicated to providing you with a truly global solution that caters to the needs of diverse communities around the world. We're excited to see how you leverage the localized interface to enhance your communities' global reach while ensuring a highly localized experience for every user. Stay tuned for more updates!

As always, we’d love to hear from you! Let us know if you have any feedback or questions below.

Ciao!

🌟 Awesome - @BasHarmsen This eagerly anticipated feature is finally here! 🇳🇱🇩🇪🇪🇦


@Nadia Nicolai Thanks for tagging! And happy with these first steps!

I now see the plan is to create new content categories per language. As feedback, I would say that in our use case, it would also be useful if you could select the language per category and per article and add relevant translations to the already created articles. This should enable customers to more easily switch languages. If left empty, the article won’t exist in that language. 

I hope this is helpful, or maybe it has been discussed, but in different use cases, this is not the best way forward. I only think that if implemented after, the admin could already have become very messy.


Hello all!

Great to read about this new feature
I have some questions already:
 

  1. Is there a possibility to export ALL phrases into one file to have them translated/reviewed outside of the community (using a professional translation tool, for example) and import them afterwards?

According to this info, phrases need to be modified individually, one by one.

In our German-language community, we have a lot of phrases, roughly 400. And, theoretically, if we wanted to have an additional language, or even more, translation/modification will cause a lot of manual, error-prone work.
(As I have a software localization/translation background, I’m sweating already 😅)
Even if translations of added languages seem to be already available (see question 3), the export would be extremely helpful for review.

  1. What to do if your community’s default language (the language your entire community is in) is not English, but another language already? Is there, in theory, a possibility to “switch” the default language or to assign the default role to another language?  

As the default language is now automatically set to English in Control (all screenshots from staging community),

the EN switcher/icon is displayed in our German-language community (see very last screenshot). Maybe changing the switcher icon via CSS can help?


………...reply continued as my reply is longer then the 50000 chars………….
 

  1. In combination with question 2:
    When I enable German as new, additional language, all “new” German phrases already exist in the UI and in Control, there’s only 12 non-UI phrases (from system mails, it seems):

     

But what is the basis of this German translation? AI or real translators? Where does it come from? And are all 17 languages already available/(pre-) translated?
 

The new, additional German translation is of course different from our existing German phrases! So currently, in practice, we would have two German versions –  the “English (Default)” on the left and the new “German (Germany)” on the right:

I will dive deeper in this new feature and I’m looking forward to your information.

Thanks a lot!


@BasHarmsen Thanks so much for sharing your thoughts! 

I totally see where you’re coming from with the suggestion to add language selection per article, allowing translations to be integrated directly. While this approach has its merits, we’ve opted for creating separate content categories for each language to ensure a thoroughly localized experience for end-users.

By setting up dedicated workspaces for each language, we aim to provide a completely localized environment. This approach does involve a bit more work on the admin side when creating articles in different languages and posting in multiple categories, but we also want to deliver a seamless and immersive experience for your users, where every aspect of their interaction is tailored to their preferred language, from navigation to content. Moreover, if you have teams or colleagues that moderate certain geographies or languages, they will have a dedicated work space and the flexibility to moderate and manage the community as it suits those geographies.

That being said, your feedback is incredibly valuable, and we’ll keep it on our radar as we move forward and continue to refine the upcoming enhancements.


Hi @Eva! Thanks for your questions.

  1. It is not yet possible to export or import phrases. I’d suggest creating an idea to export/import phrases.
  2. It seems the default language of your instance is set to English in the backend, not German. Please correct me if I’m wrong; I am assuming you customized English phrases to German. If that’s the case, I’d recommend you reach out to your CSM or support for help.
  3. All phrases in all languages are pre-translated. We are not using any automatic translations yet. Some phrases were translated by real translators and some by AI optimized for SaaS interface.

 


Thanks for your info @Sudhanshu. I just created an idea: 

 


Great addition!

But hasn't it rolled out a it too soon? On our own Community page as well as Gainsight their Community page, the language button is added but doesn't allow switching yet nor do I see any settings in the back-end.


Edit that, I do see that I can set it up, but we currently only support English thus the switch should not be visible. Or am I mistaken?

 


I just noticed, the language switcher has appeared in my productive community, too.

it’s a German-language community only (no other languages) and the default language in Control is set to English (see my posts above) and cannot be changed, this looks very odd!!

How can I hide the language switcher from my productive community?


Hi, Guys! 

Today our homepage starts to show the language selector, but we have only one language in our production environment. 
Is this correct to show the selector? For us it's a bit strange to show the selector without other languages.

image.png


Some Custom CSS does the trick for now:

.main-navigation--language-switcher {
     display: none !important;
}

 


We are also an English only Community for now. I’d like to know if I can remove the EN language flag in the Mega Menu? We are planning some changes here and in our Sandbox I can see it is taking up too much space. How can I remove this?


How can I hide the language switcher from my productive community?

I’d like to know if I can remove the EN language flag in the Mega Menu?

Yes, let´s hide the option please 😎


Some Custom CSS does the trick for now:

.main-navigation--language-switcher {
     display: none !important;
}

 

This works perfectly, thanks @Mark Jongeling 🔝


I’d like the ability to turn this off in our Community, as mentioned by @Milla. Also, the language option is English-US, but it shows the Union Flag. American English and British English are two different things.

Was this rolled out to only sandbox environments before being pushed to production? I don’t recall getting any comms on this one so we could test and provide feedback. 


I feel like we should switch @Mark Jongeling to the author of this posts, because it seems like it’s going to be quite popular and he deserves ALL the points for quickly solving this for us. 🤣

(I don’t mean to vulture your points, Mark, just optimizing for future community searches. Thanks again!) 

Related: 

 


No problem @DannyPancratz, I'm all okay with it 😁 


The EN box has disappeared from our site without having to put in the custom CSS, so someone is paying attention!


Hi everyone! Firstly, we apologies for any confusion caused by the recent appearance of the language switcher without being enabled by you. This was a small oversight in our ongoing efforts to enhance the multi-language support on CC.

We have addressed the issue as quickly as possible and are continuing to work to ensure this can be avoided in the future. Thank you for your understanding and patience.

If there are further issues or suggestions you have, please don’t hesitate to share.


I read we are making new language based categories,  will this also work for groups?  I feel that might be the smallest lift, to launch a language based group with all the ui in the right language.


Hi @juan.delrio! Thanks for your question. With the current functionality (Localized UI and Groups), what do you think is missing for you to start a group for a particular language? 

 


This is a nitpitcky question, but wondering why/when the ‘EN’ icon changed from the British flag to the US flag and is there a way to change it? 
 


We just implemented the language switcher yesterday and almost immediately got feedback from a member that it should be the British flag. I didn’t think much of it but then noticed in screenshots included in this post that it was previously the British flag so wondering if there is a reason behind the change? 


Hi @MeghanM! Thanks for your comment. By default, we have english_US on the platform; that’s why we have the US flag here. Any particular reason for showing British flag here?


@Sudhanshu Moreso I was just curious why the UI changed from the screenshots above. Understood that ‘English_US’ would show an American flag, but since the public UI only shows ‘EN’, I can see how using the American flag to represent English could be confusing or problematic for people who speak that language but don’t reside in the US. For example, German is the predominant language in Switzerland and Austria, but is represented by the German flag in the language picker. Spanish is represented by the Spain flag, but also represents a lot of Central American countries, etc. 

Just some food for thought! 😊