Knowledge Base in Different Languages

[Roman Wolf]

Hi community,

we are using Confluence (cloud) and JIRA service desk (cloud). Now we are about to set up a knowledge base in Confluence as a separate space.

It will be filled by us and accessible for our customers. As we are having customers with different language background we want to support at least 2 languages and maybe add more in the future.

To not run into problem at a too late point in time we are thinking about how to achieve this goal.

Requirements we have so far:

• For one article user should easily switch the language (found an article in english but wanna read it in french)
• Create/Change one article in one language and get the other translated articles created/updated automatically (with as less effort as possible)
• Have the same article hierarchy structure for each language (if we need one page for each article and each language)
• Enforce some kind of style throughout the knowledge base (should be feasible thru Template usage)
• Generate pages from outside (should be feasible thru Confluence REST API)

The first idea was to simply provide one article on different pages where each page is a translation of this article. The title must be unique in one space so we would have to add something like the language to the title. This already gives the impression to be not the best solution on that.

What would be your way to achieve this? What obstacles to keep in mind? Maybe there are plugins that can help or other ways how to build up such a system.

We are already aware of this question: https://community.atlassian.com/t5/Confluence-discussions/Developing-a-Knowledge-Management-Solution-in-Confluence/td-p/1368595#M7326

Any feedback on would be welcome,

Roman

[Bill Bailey · Accepted solution]

This plugin looks like it would do a lot of what you want: Lango: Language and translation manager and is compatible with Jira service desk.

[Roman Wolf]

Hi Bill,

This plugin looks promising. Thanks for sharing.

Roman

[Roman Wolf]

Any ideas on how to achieve this with Confluence/Service Desk capabilities only?

Roman

[Bill Bailey]

No, just manually building parallel structures is the only thing I can think of.

[Roman Wolf]

Thanks a lot.

[Milla Pyyhtiä]

How did you manage to translate the Confluense page titels and Jira Knowledge base categories?

[Roman Wolf]

Hi @Milla Pyyhtiä

as there is no built-in functionality available yet you have to work around it.

With the Knowledge Base you are able to add multiple spaces. So currently we add the spaces of all product documentation relevant. They are only in one language.

But later we could add more spaces holding the same documentation in additional languages.

Regards, Roman