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Automatically Translate Articles with Machine Translations

Machine translate your HelpDocs articles into 100+ languages in seconds. Translate single articles, bulk translate, and manage translation credits on supported plans.

River Sloane
Updated by River Sloane
4 min read
Table of Contents

Selling to customers around the world can increase the reach of your business. The problem comes when you need to support them in their language. If you're not a linguist this becomes a lot of work.

With our automatic machine translations, you can send an article off to be translated and get back an accurate translation in seconds. This saves having to get a third party involved and you can delay picking up that language dictionary a little longer 🀫

This feature is available on certain plans.
🌐 Supported language list

We use neural machine translation to give you the best possible quality. You can translate to and from any of these languages:

Language Name

Language Code

Afrikaans

af

Albanian

sq

Amharic

am

Arabic

ar

Armenian

hy

Azerbaijani

az

Basque

eu

Belarusian

be

Bengali

bn

Bosnian

bs

Bulgarian

bg

Catalan

ca

Cebuano

ceb (ISO-639-2)

Chinese (Simplified)

zh-CN (BCP-47)

Chinese (Traditional)

zh-TW (BCP-47)

Corsican

co

Croatian

hr

Czech

cs

Danish

da

Dutch

nl

English

en

Esperanto

eo

Estonian

et

Finnish

fi

French

fr

Frisian

fy

Galician

gl

Georgian

ka

German

de

Greek

el

Gujarati

gu

Haitian Creole

ht

Hausa

ha

Hawaiian

haw (ISO-639-2)

Hebrew

he

Hindi

hi

Hmong

hmn (ISO-639-2)

Hungarian

hu

Icelandic

is

Igbo

ig

Indonesian

id

Irish

ga

Italian

it

Japanese

ja

Javanese

jw

Kannada

kn

Kazakh

kk

Khmer

km

Korean

ko

Kurdish

ku

Kyrgyz

ky

Lao

lo

Latin

la

Latvian

lv

Lithuanian

lt

Luxembourgish

lb

Macedonian

mk

Malagasy

mg

Malay

ms

Malayalam

ml

Maltese

mt

Maori

mi

Marathi

mr

Mongolian

mn

Myanmar (Burmese)

my

Nepali

ne

Norwegian

no

Nyanja (Chichewa)

ny

Pashto

ps

Persian

fa

Polish

pl

Portuguese (Portugal, Brazil)

pt

Punjabi

pa

Romanian

ro

Russian

ru

Samoan

sm

Scots Gaelic

gd

Serbian

sr

Sesotho

st

Shona

sn

Sindhi

sd

Sinhala (Sinhalese)

si

Slovak

sk

Slovenian

sl

Somali

so

Spanish

es

Sundanese

su

Swahili

sw

Swedish

sv

Tagalog (Filipino)

tl

Tajik

tg

Tamil

ta

Telugu

te

Thai

th

Turkish

tr

Ukrainian

uk

Urdu

ur

Uzbek

uz

Vietnamese

vi

Welsh

cy

Xhosa

xh

Yiddish

yi

Yoruba

yo

Zulu

zu

How to Machine Translate Articles

  1. Open your article and switch to the secondary language you want to translate into
  2. Click the language chip (for example DE) in the row under the title, next to the status, author, and category
  3. Click Machine translate into [language]…
  4. Review your translation credit total (each article translation uses 1 credit) and click Translate into [language code]
  5. You're done! Machine translated articles' status will automatically be set to Complete
Save any changes before you translate. You can machine translate each language of an article once an hour.
Links to your other articles are pointed at their translated versions, as long as those translations are live.

Bulk Translate a Single Article

  1. Head to the article you want to translate in your default language
  2. Click the language chip (for example EN) in the row under the title
  3. Click Translate into all languages…
  4. You'll see all available languages with their current translation status
  5. Select the languages you'd like to translate into, or click Select all
  6. Click Translate [number] languages
  7. You'll get a confirmation for each successfully translated language
Translation status shows whether each language is Not translated, Outdated, In progress, or Translated. Languages that are already translated and up to date can't be selected.

Bulk Translating Multiple Articles

  1. Switch to the language you want to translate into
    HelpDocs language and account switcher dropdown with search bar and language options
  2. Select articles with the checkboxes (up to 50 at a time)
  3. Click the Bulk edit button in the top right
  4. Click Actions in the side modal
  5. Click Translate
Bulk Edit modal on the Actions tab with a pink Translate button to translate 2 articles.
Only articles that are not already translated or have out of date translations will be selected for translation, so you'll use at most one credit per selected article
We also translate your category's title and description for free if they haven't been translated yet 🎁

Limitations

  • Translation count
    We'd love to offer unlimited translations but this awesome stuff costs us. Your plan includes a monthly allowance, and you can buy extra credits if you need more translations ✨
  • Accuracy
    We do our best and employ the latest translation technology but we can't guarantee the content you get back will be 100% accurate
  • HTML complexity
    If your article's really complicated with lots of HTML elements we may struggle to translate it for you. The most common offender here is massive tables. If you encounter this you can split your large elements into smaller ones before translation πŸ•΅οΈβ€β™€οΈ
  • Article length
    We can translate articles up to 2,500 words ✍️
  • Available Languages
    We support a lotta languages but not every language

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