Setting Up Your Contentstack Connector

Please note that this Connector is a paid product. For pricing information, please reach out to your Smartling Customer Success Manager.

It is important to ensure that languages selected in your Contentstack instance are the same as languages configured in your Contentstack project in Smartling.

Set up Languages in Contentstack

• Log into your Contentstack account.
• Click the gear icon and select Languages from the dropdown.
• Add Languages.
• Click the add New Language button and choose your target languages.

Connecting Contentstack to Smartling

1. Create a Contentstack Connector project type in your Smartling Account.
   • Ensure all required target languages are added to the project
2. From within this project, click on the Settings tab > Contentstack Settings
3. Click Connect To Contentstack and choose the region where your datacenters are located
   
   
4. Log into Contentstack
   • We recommend creating a dedicated user role for the Connector to ensure no disruption to your localization process, should an email address become deactivated for any reason
5. Choose the Stack your content is in
   • This is the stack the Contentstack Connector and Smartling App integrate with
6. Select the source locale of the content
   • This should match with the source locale of the Smartling project
7. Your Contentstack is connected to Smartling.
   • The Organization UID and API key are automatically generated based on the credentials provided above.

Contentstack Connector Configuration

General

You can configure the behavior of the connector when updates are made to your previously translated content.

1. From within your Smartling Contentstack Project, click on Project Settings > Contentstack Settings.
2. Click the Automation of Prior Request for Translation dropdown to select your desired behavior.
3. Click Save.
   
   

Automation of Prior Request for Translation

• Auto: The Contentstack Connector will detect changes to source content every 3 hours. Any changes detected to the source content will be submitted to Smartling for translation, batched into a Job and sit in awaiting authorization. However, if auto-authorize is enabled under Smartling Settings, the updated content will be batched into a Job and automatically authorized for translation. Smartling will not detect net new content, only updates to content that have been submitted for translation in the past.
• Manual: The Contentstack Connector will detect changes to source content every 3 hours, but will not submit new content for translation. Changed content will be indicated by a checkmark in the Outdated column in the Contentstack Progress (New Experience).
• Disabled: The Contentstack Connector will not detect changes to source content or automatically submit new changes.

3 hours is the recommended shortest time duration between checks. Talk to your Solutions Architect about changing the frequency to longer wave periods using cron.

Language Configuration 

1. From within your Smartling Contentstack Project, click on Project Settings > Contentstack Settings.
2. In the Language Configuration section, you will see the number of target languages in your Smartling project, along with the source language in your Smartling project. These details should match dropdown menus with your Contentstack target languages.
3. Choose the correct target language from the dropdown menu to map the language in your Contentstack language configuration to your Smartling project target language.
4. Click Save after mapping each of the target languages.

You cannot map a Smartling language to more than one Contentstack language. 

Configure Content Parsing

When Smartling captures content from Contentstack it may process the fields of an entry based on your configuration settings and may break down the individual fields into even smaller strings for translation. This process makes it easier to produce higher quality translations faster.

1. From your Contentful project, click the Settings tab
2. Click Contentful Settings
3. Under Content Parsing, Entries is the default content selection. Click each field to expand and choose your preferred parsing option
4. Click Save
   

Custom JSON Parsing

This allows you to translate custom JSON fields from Contentstack by specifying the path to the field in Contentstack, and setting a parsing option. To find the path, you need to export an entry that contains the custom field. The JSON that is exported will provide the full path to the field.

Example Custom Field JSON

{
"_version": 2,
"locale": "en-us",
"uid": "blt5e94dd22b908fc13",
"_in_progress": false,
"created_at": "2023-05-31T17:29:17.569Z",
"created_by": "blt587eec7a22402e70",
"json_custom": {
"value": [
{
"key": "CarColor",
"value": "Red"
},
]
},
"tags": [
],
"title": "Car json custom field",
"updated_at": "2023-05-31T17:29:24.424Z",
"updated_by": "blt587eec7a22402e70"
}

1. To define a custom field for translation, click Add New Field
2. Under Field Path (Contentstack), insert the path as seen in the JSON of the custom field. From the above example, the path would be inserted as, /*/json_custom/value/red
3. Choose a parsing type from one of the options, HTML, Markdown, Plain text
4. You also have the option to include a description for your own reference

Workflow Name Mapping

This setting allows you to define the Contentstack workflow stage where translation requests are automatically initiated, and upon receiving translations, the connector automatically updates the workflow stage to the desired next step.

Smartling Settings

Talk to your Customer Success Manager or Solutions Architect about options on auto-authorization and translation retrieval.