Launching International Sites on Kentico

Exemplifi
5 min readJan 5, 2022

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Kentico is a versatile headless CMS and can host content in multiple languages (cultures). Multilingual websites have separate versions of pages for each language. Kentico allows you to offer culture versions of the website to visitors based on various settings.

You can find a list of available cultures in the Localization application on the Cultures tab. All major cultures are provided by default. You can assign cultures to websites and translate the content to the respective languages.

Configuring multiple cultures for website

Open the Sites application and edit your site. You can assign cultures using the Add cultures button in the culture tab.

Now in the Pages application, you can see the culture option enabled below the content tree. You can switch to other languages as follows.

Configuring the default content culture

If we create a website based on a web template, the site uses the culture of the given web template. All default Kentico web templates use English — United States as their default culture.

We can change this default settings in

Settings -> content -> Default content culture

Control user access for specific cultures.

Kentico allows you to control users to access specific language versions of pages.

In the Users application, select the user whom you want to control access. In the Language tab click on User can edit the following languages and click on add languages button to select desired cultures. Now the user can able to edit only the selected languages page in the page application.

Managing cultures

Users with the Global administrator privilege level can manage all cultures in the Localization application on the Cultures tab. To display only UI cultures, choose Yes in the Is UI culture filter and click Search.

Editing Multilingual website content

In the Pages application on a multilingual website, you can see the language selector below the content tree. Use the selector to switch between language versions of the currently selected page.

Creating multiple language versions of pages

In the Pages application. Select the root page in the content tree and switch to French culture. Since the French version of the page does not exist yet, you can create it through one of the following ways:

Choose to Copy content from another language.

Select English — United States.

The French version of the root page has now been created. You can now translate other pages on the website:

Configuring translation services

You can automate or outsource the translation of website content using translation services. Translation services allow you to create multilingual sites without having to edit the text in the Kentico administration interface. The system automatically ensures the transfer of data between the website’s pages and translation providers. Translation data is exported and imported via files using the standard XML-based XLIFF format.

There are two general categories of translation services:

The main purpose of translation services is to create language versions of the website’s pages based on the content in another language. There are several different ways to submit pages for translation.

Enabling translation services

We can enable the translation service functionality in the Settings application

Select the Content -> Translation services category and Check Enable translation services.

Configuring content for translation

Translation services can process the following types of page content:

  • Content of editable regions on Portal Engine pages
  • Values of page fields (entered on the Form or Content tab of the Pages application)
  • The properties of web parts and widgets placed on the given page
  • Page file attachments (without their image variants)

Configuring page fields

To choose which page fields are sent for translation, Open the Page types application.

Edit the specific page type and switch to the Fields tab. Select the field you wish to configure and enable or disable the Translate field flag. Translation is only available for fields with the Text, Long text or File Data type.

Summary

Kentico is a great CMS for companies that have a multi-lingual audience and whose offerings serve a large base of cultures. Creating a great user experience includes having a website that can easily communicate with consumers in their language of choice. Kentico allows developers to build websites that span multiple languages and automatically adjust to users from multiple geographies and provides translation aswell. At Exemplifi, we work extensively with Kentico and other headless CMS and have built multiple websites using its versatility.

If you liked this insight and want more updates, we’d love for you to join us on Linkedin at Exemplifi, Facebook at ExemplifiSites or Twitter at ExemplifiSites.

Originally published at https://www.exemplifi.io.

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Exemplifi
Exemplifi

Written by Exemplifi

We build secure, accessible and functional enterprise and government websites

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