This article is for Account Owners and Project Managers using the Global Delivery Network
The Global Delivery Network (GDN) mirrors your source content on your translated sites. In some cases, you might want to take this one step further and create or display content specific to certain regions or languages you support that is different that what is on your source site. This could be to accommodate different product offerings in different countries, or to provide more tailored experience for users and audiences in each market. This is called locale or language specific content, a the GDN offers a few solutions to accomplish this on your translated sites.
This article covers a few of the most common examples of locale specific content:
- Language Specific Content within Pages
- Images
- Content Authored In-Language
- Serving Language-Specific Content At Scale
Language Specific Content within Pages
The GDN allows you to rewrite or adapt sections of your source content within a page to any locale within the Smartling dashboard using Content Swaps.
You can also use Content Swaps to make changes to your HTML within a page on a translated site. For example, if you include a Facebook icon on a page that you want to display in every region except for China, you could use the Content Swap feature to serve different HTML on your Chinese page only.
Need to serve a different page layout to each region? Skip ahead to the last section.
Images
If you simply need to replace images with localized or more culturally appropriate ones, please see Image Replacement for more details.
Content Authored In-Language
If you have authored content in language, or if you are serving already translated content from our source site, you do not want the GDN to capture this content for translation.
Prevent the content from being captured by URL, class or id via the dashboard or markup your source code with the No Translate class.
For example, if your team in Korea published a Korean newsletter on your site, which does not require translation, you can apply a No Translate class to the URL for this newsletter page.
Serving Language Specific Content At Scale
If you need to control what content is displayed to certain regions at scale, such as a product catalogue, different page layouts, or many pages that are specific to certain regions, it is recommended to handle this at the Content Management System (CMS) level rather than using the methods described above.
Many modern CMS platforms have built in capabilities, or extensions that allow you to read an incoming header value, to determine what content to serve to an end user. Learn about the headers sent by the Smartling GDN to your upstream server here. Use these headers, such as X-Language-Locale to determine what content to serve to the end user visiting your translated site.
When you authorize locale-specific content, make sure it's only authorized into its intended locale(s). If your website contains a significant amount of localized content that will be managed by different regional stakeholders, consider a Primary-Secondary GDN configuration which will allow you to manage each language authorization queue in separate GDN Projects while sharing other GDN configuration or integration elements.