I often get asked "what are the translation capabilities in the platform?" in the sense of how can they be used. Coupled with this, there is often a mis-understanding around when Dynamic Translation can be used vs when it should be used. So, let's go through that in this post and discuss what in-platform products / capabilities we have that when used in the right way can empower you to achieve what you're after.
What is there in the platform?
Let's start with what are the main capabilities, below you'll find a high-level overview slide I've put together to help explain the concepts quickly:
Starting from the middle of the core, we can see that we have 4 primary UI ("Interfaces") areas (Portals, Mobile, Workspaces, UI16).
- For those curious, "Polaris" / Next-Experience sits between UI16 and Workspace depending on the experience used.
Then we can see a bunch of "interactions", e.g. Email, KB's, Portal(s) etc. This is to show the different ways users can interact with the platform, e.g. are they browsing a portal and consuming it's content or are they chatting with an agent?
- Here you will notice that nearly all of them have a line leading to a feature, yet "email" and "forms" do not. This is because (currently) these two interactions have their own specific nuances.
- To learn more about "emails" check this previous blog post, where as forms (currently at least) would be a combination of exports and imports from the [sys_documentation] table for their respective field labels.
- The item of "fields" is the contents of a string field, which currently is only available in UI16.
The remainder of the diagram shows you where Translation Management from KM resides in the grand scheme of things, coupled with how the Localization Framework can be used (with or without Dynamic Translation) to achieve certain structured translations or content or interfaces.
Although it should be said that Dynamic Translation is primarily used for real-time chats across languages, with an additional scenario being for generating other language content when speed is of the essence (this is because of translation best-practices advising to review any MT outputs for quality reasons. More info on this topic can be found in our Workbook here).
Know the building blocks
I know I say it a lot in my webinars and sessions, however it really is a good adage to think about. If you consider the platform as a toolkit of "building blocks" when you fully know and understand what block works in what way and how they can be used together, then you'll be able to achieve almost anything you can think of.
What have we learned?
So, we can see that there are many options available for us to use. Some simplify seemingly complex concepts and some can even be automated (if we so wish). Ultimately, it's about knowing which is the right option for what is trying to be achieved.
Feel free to leave a comment below for further discussion and as always please like, share and subscribe for more as it always helps
