Multi-language Knowledge Base

If your customers span multiple languages, the worst answer is “we have a help center, but only in English.” Atender’s Knowledge Base is built so you write articles once in your default language and translate them — on demand — into every active language. Translations cover categories, subcategories, articles, sections, and the surrounding UI strings on the public site.

Translation runs when you ask for it. Each language has a Translation Sync card showing current coverage; clicking Sync Translations queues jobs for whatever’s missing or out of date. This is deliberate: translation uses AI inference and costs money, so Atender doesn’t auto-translate on every save.

A typical cadence is to run Sync Translations after a batch of content edits (weekly, monthly, or after a major content push) rather than after every save.

What gets translated

• Article title — Yes — Per-language.
• Article summary — Yes — Per-language.
• Article body — Yes — Per-language. Markdown structure preserved.
• Category name and description — Yes — Per-language.
• Subcategory name — Yes — Per-language.
• Section names and descriptions — Yes — Per-language.
• Keywords — Yes — Per-language. Each language has its own keyword list.
• UI strings on the public site — Yes — The labels around your articles (“Search”, “Categories”, “Was this helpful?”) translate too.
• Tags — No — Tag slugs stay in the default language. The display name can be translated manually if needed.
• Protected terms — No (by design) — Brand names, product names, and any term you mark as protected stay untranslated. See Manage protected terms.

Languages, status, and the default

Each language has one of two statuses:

• Active — Live. Customers in this language see translated content.
• Disabled — Off. Customers in this language see the default language instead. Useful when you want to pause a language without losing translations.

New secondary languages are created Disabled. You run Sync Translations, review coverage, then toggle Active when you’re satisfied. There’s no “pending” middle state — the toggle is the readiness gate.

Exactly one language is the default. The default is the source of truth — translation jobs translate from it. Articles are authored in the default. You can change the default later, but it’s a heavier change — translations need to re-run from the new source via Force Retranslate All.

How translations stay current

Atender does not auto-translate on save. After publishing an article (new or edited), translations stay on whatever version they were on until you trigger a new run:

• Sync Translations — Translates everything missing or out of date. Cheap and incremental.
• Force Retranslate All — Re-runs every article through translation, ignoring existing translations. Costs significantly more — use after major content overhauls or after changing protected-term lists.

The Translation Sync card on each language shows current coverage so you can spot drift at a glance. See Translation completeness for the exact metrics.

How customers see the right language

The public help center detects the customer’s language from:

1. The URL — if the customer visits /de or /sv, that wins.
2. The Accept-Language header — what their browser asks for.
3. Their explicit choice — the language switcher in the public site header. The choice is remembered in a cookie.

If the customer’s preferred language has no published translation for the article they’re reading, they fall back to the default language version. The article still loads — it just renders in the default language.

Markets vs. languages

Markets are a separate concept. A market is a region — country or country group — and is independent of language. See Markets vs Languages for the full distinction. Most teams start with languages only; markets matter primarily for regional content variants and search filtering.

When automatic translation isn’t enough

Auto-translation is fast and consistent, but it’s not perfect. Reach for the manual override when:

• A specific phrase needs the local-language convention. (“My account” might be “Min konto” by translation but “Mitt konto” is what customers actually expect.) Use a protected term with a per-language override.
• A product feature has a different name in a market. Same fix — protected term with per-language override.
• An entire article needs a different framing for one language. Edit the translation directly in the editor for that language. Manual edits stick — the next Sync Translations won’t overwrite them.

Where to go next

• Add a language: Enable a language
• See coverage in detail: Translation completeness reference
• Lock down brand terms: Manage protected terms
• Understand search across languages: KB search and AI retrieval