Languages

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Important

An administrator (or a developer with administration access rights) enables content languages.

To set the CMS 13 user interface language, see Set a personal language preference in Get started with CMS (SaaS).

Editors can create content in a language after you activate it and set an access level for a language to authorize editors to create or edit pages in that language.

When an editor copies a page, language versions are copied regardless of the editor's language rights. This means that if an editor with access rights to English only copies a page that exists in English and French and pastes that somewhere, both language versions are copied.

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Note

Auto-creation of language branches when creating content in a non-existent locale has been removed in CMS 13. In earlier versions, attempting to create content in a locale that had not been explicitly added and enabled would silently create a language branch. This behavior no longer applies.

Creating content in a locale that does not exist in your instance, or that exists but is not enabled (Available selected), now returns an error. Ensure that every language you intend to use for content creation is both added and set to Available before editors attempt to create or edit content in that language. See Add languages below.

View languages

Go to Settings > Languages. The installed website languages display.

You can complete the following:

• Select Available > True to show activated languages (in blue); Available > False to show unactivated languages (in gray); Available > All to see both lists.
• Sort by click on the Name, Language Code, or Sort Index column heading.
• See which languages are turned on for active editing with a checkmark in the Available column.
• Adjust the order of the languages by changing the sort index number in the language settings.

Activate or deactivate a language

Click the name of the language you want to activate. Select Available and click Save. Deselect Available to deactivate.

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Note

Deactivating a language (deselectAvailable) does not delete existing content in that language. Existing content remains accessible but cannot be edited until the language is re-enabled. Editors cannot create new content in a deactivated language — attempting to do so returns an error.

Add languages

Before an editor can edit content in different languages, you need to add and turn on the languages in the admin view and then turn them on for editing in the CMS edit view.

1. Go to Settings > Languages.

2. Select the languages you want. You can start typing in the Search box to filter languages.

   

3. Click Add Languages to add them to the languages list.

4. Click a language to edit its settings. The Settings window displays.

   
   • Name –  Enter a name for that language to be shown in the edit view. The field contains the name of the language encoding, but you can change this if you want.
   • Template icon – Enter the relative path to an icon symbolizing the language.
   • URL slug – Provide a specific prefix to show the content of the relevant language. If you do not provide a prefix, the language code is used, such as www.company.com/nl.
   • Sort Index – Enter a number to indicate what precedent this language has.
   • Fallback language – Select a language to act as a fallback if a page doesn’t have a translation for this language.

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     Note

     For changes to Fallback languages to take effect, you must rebuild the index.

   • Available – Select if you want to turn on the language to be active for editing in edit view. This option also affects whether the language is available to website visitors. A disabled language is not visible in the edit view. Existing content in that language is still accessible but cannot be edited.

5. Select the Permissions tab.

   

   • Add User/Group –  Select to define which editor groups have access to create and edit content in this language (see below). When you add a language, it is available for the Everyone group by default. 

     An editor's create and edit access rights to content and language determine which actions the editor can perform on the content. This means that an editor must have edit access for a specific language and a specific item to edit the content in that language.

     When a language has Everyone as access rights, access rights for an item apply to all languages. This also means that an editor with delete access rights for content can delete an entire node with content in all languages, including content in languages to which the editor does not have access.

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     Note

     Removing the Everyone group in a certain language may cause some editors to lose their access rights to create and edit content in that language.

6. Click Save.

Graph search results in different languages

CMS (SaaS) works with Optimizely Graph to deliver search results for up to 33 supported language locales. See Supported locales with language analysis. See also Settings > GraphiQL.

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Note

Editors can create content in any of the 790 possible languages in CMS Settings by making those languages Available in their instance. Many languages are regional variations of a single language. For example, English exists in more than 100 variants.

Consider a search for the word "world" on a page that is translated into Swedish, English, and Akan. Optimizely Graph can search all three translated pages and find "world" in all three translations.

However, because Optimizely Graph does not have a language analyzer for Akan it cannot find the plural of the search term ("worlds"), but can find "worlds" in the Swedish and English-translated pages with their language analyzers.

Remove an existing language

Remove a language from the website by opening the language settings and clearing the Available option.