Manage languages

📘
Note
An administrator enables languages; see Manage website languages.

Optimizely has powerful support for multi-language management, including translating content into a number of languages, defining fallback languages for non-translated content, and switching language for the editorial user interface.

Many large websites display content in several languages. Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) has powerful support for multi-language management, including translating content into other languages, defining fallback languages for non-translated content, and switching languages for the editorial user interface. You can also use the Optimizely Languages app for translating content.

How does CMS know which language to display to visitors? CMS enforces the language to be visible in the URL, path, or domain part of the URL. When a website visitor selects a language option (if available), content in that language displays. Alternatively, the preferred content display language may be detected by the browser used by the visitor. A fallback procedure may be applied if content does not exist in a selected language.

Usually, a website has a default content language set up at the time of installation and might be set up with other languages.

Administrators can also set up different access rights to different languages so that you can access English and French content but not German and Spanish, for example.
Editors can create content in a particular language after you add and activate the language and set an access level for a language. This prevents unauthorized editors from creating or editing 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.

View site languages

Go to Settings > Languages. The installed website languages display. You can see which languages are turned on for active editing in edit view, and the order in which languages are available. You can adjust the order of the languages using the arrows to the left of the language. To change a language's settings, click its name.

To activate an existing language, select More > Make Available.

Add and activate languages

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

Go to Settings > Languages.
Click Add Languages to add a language.
Click a language to edit its settings. A list of available language codes displays.
Select a language code by clicking the name such as svenska. Set the fields on the Settings tab.
- 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. Several flags are zipped in modules_protected\CMS.zip\App_Themes\Default\Images folder. If you want to make your own icons, make them 15x15 pixels, so they fit properly in the edit view.
- 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.
- Available – Select if you want to turn on the language to be active for editing in edit view. When selected the added language displays in the Language drop-down menu in Edit view. When the language is turned on, as described above, it is available for content translation.
  
  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.
Set the fields on the Permissions tab.
- Add Users/Groups – Click 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. Only users with access rights for a language have it available on the Sites tab and can create and edit content in that language.
  
  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.
  
  📘
  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.
Click Save.

Remove a language from the website

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

Select a language to work with

To switch the language in CMS, go to the Sites tab in the navigation panel and select the desired language to work with. To view content in a language, select the Language drop-down menu. The user interface reloads, displaying the page tree in the selected language.

If your master language is English and you switch to Swedish, pages not yet translated into Swedish are displayed in italics in the page tree and with the language code (en for English; de for German). Pages that exist in Swedish are displayed in normal font.

To view only translated pages, select Show Content in Current Language Only from the page tree's Settings button. This filters out other language versions. You can also use this option in the assets panel and the Versions gadget to view blocks and versions only in the current language. Click Show All Languages to see the entire content tree again.

When you only show content in one language, you can move pages to another location in the page tree structure by drag and drop or copy and paste, but you cannot sort pages. Sorting is disabled because sorting in one language, where you may not see all pages, can cause unexpected results in other languages.

The setting Show Content in Current Language Only is enabled individually for each panel or gadget instance. This means that you, for example, can add the Versions gadget in Publish versions of content twice and display only the current language in one of the instances and languages in the other.

You can also switch languages by selecting the desired language in the Header when editing translated content in the All Properties view. The user interface reloads, displaying the content in the selected language.

View versions of content in another language

You can use the Versions gadget to see the different language versions when you translate content. By selecting a language in the version list, you can switch to editing in another language using the switch option in the notification bar.

You can search for language versions for some content by typing a keyword in the search field for Pages or Blocks in the assets panel.

Delete versions of content by specific language

Select More > Delete Version or More > Delete All [language] Versions in the Versions gadget to delete one or more language versions for content.

❗️
Warning
Deleting one or more language versions cannot be undone.

User interface languages

The Optimizely CMS user interface is available in 12 language options. English is the master language, and the others are translated languages. You can have many more content languages.

DA – Danish
DE – German
EN – English
ES – Spanish
FI – Finnish
FR – French
IT – Italian
JA – Japanese
NL – Dutch
NO – Norwegian
SV – Swedish
ZH – Simplified Chinese

To set the desired user interface language for CMS, click your user profile name. Select My Settings > Display Options tab. At the Personal Language drop-down list, select the language of your choice, and click Save.

Global properties

Depending on your implementation, some properties may be globally shared, and you can edit them in the master language. These properties are marked as non-editable when editing the content in another language. Switch to the default language if you need to edit these. When editing in the All Properties view, the default language is usually the first language listed next to Languages in the header.

Optimizely Commerce Connect and multiple languages

If you have Optimizely Commerce Connect installed, see Manage languages for catalogs in the Optimizely Commerce Connect section for information about working with multiple languages.