Translating Data Extensions with the Salesforce Marketing Cloud Connector

Data Extensions is Salesforce's highly customizable tool and the Smartling Salesforce Marketing Cloud (SFMC) Connector supports the most common way of using it.
The SFMC Connector considers Data Extension as a table where one of the columns is defined as a Language column and other columns contain text translated to this language. When a Data Extension is sent for translation, the SFMC Connector takes the row with source language and sends all text fields for translation.

When translations are complete, the SFMC Connector creates a new row for the target language or takes an existing one by target locale code, and writes translated text into the same fields where the source text was taken from. Target locale codes are taken from the SFMC Connector's language configuration.

Prerequisites 

To translation Data Extensions, the following conditions must be met:

1. All translatable Data Extensions should contain “Smartling translation” in the description.
2. All translatable Data Extensions should have one column where language code is stored, the name of this column should be the same across all translatable Data Extensions.
3. We recommend defining the Language Column as Primary Key.
4. All translatable Data Extensions should not have other primary keys then the Language Column
5. All translatable Data Extensions should have at least one row with source 
6. All source rows in all translatable Data Extensions should contain the same value of the Source Language as in the SFMC Language Configuration.

Only Data Extensions that have all required data can be successfully translated by the SFMC Connector.

How to Create and Configure Data Extensions

1. Add "Smartling translation" into “Description” field

2. Create field for locale codes:
   • It can have any name, later this name should be configured in SFMC Connector Language Configuration
   • Data Type = Text
   • Length > 5
   • Primary Key = checked
   • Nullable = unchecked

Important: you must use the same column name across all your Data Extensions

3. Add additional fields for the SFMC Connector to insert the translated strings

• On the screenshot above you can see fields with names “message1”...“message3” where you can store original strings and the SFMC Connector will add translated strings.
• Data Extension may contain any field types (including Date and Number) but only value of text fields will be ingested into Smartling. Another example of Data Extension:

4. Add data into your Data Extension
   • One of rows must contain source locale code that will be configured in the SFMC Connector. On the screenshot below you can see the row with locale_code=en. This code (“en”) will be configured in connector and this row will be ingested as source content.

Important: you must use the same source locale code across all your Data Extensions

AMPscript translation is supported via Data Extensions