Work with multiple languages

  • Updated

Many large websites display content in several languages. Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) has powerful support for multi-language management, including being able to translate content into a wide range of languages, defining fallback languages for non-translated content, and switching language for the editorial user interface.

How does CMS know which language to display to visitors? CMS enforces the language to be visible in the URL, in the path or the domain part of the URL. When a website visitor selects a language option (if available), content in that language appears. Alternatively, the preferred content display language may be detected by the browser used by the visitor. If content does not exist in a selected language, a fallback procedure may be applied.

Enable content languages

Usually a website has a default content language set up at the time of installation, and might be set up with other languages.

An administrator enables languages; see Managing website languages. Administrators can also set up different access rights to different languages so that you can access to English and French content, but not to German and Spanish, for example.

User interface languages

The Optimizely user interface is available in a number of different languages. To set the desired user interface language for CMS, click your user profile name. Select My Settings > Display Options tab. At the Personal Language drop-down list, select the language of your choice, and click Save.

 Optimizely Customized Commerce and multiple languages

See Multi-language management to work with multiple languages if you have Optimizely Customized Commerce installed.

 Optimizely Search & Navigation and multiple languages

See Optimizing multiple sites and languages to work with multiple languages if you have Optimizely Search & Navigation installed.