How to manage new content in your dashboard

This guide will show you how to efficiently manage your content as it’s found by Localize and brought into your dashboard in web-based projects. You will learn how to manage your first batch of content and new content going forward, along with how to use various Localize features to streamline your translation management efforts.

What you'll learn

How new content gets into your Localize dashboard
How to manage your first batch of content
How to manage new content going forward
How to use Localize features to manage your content

Prerequisites

You have created a Project in your Localize dashboard
You’ve installed Localize in your website or app

How new content gets into your Localize dashboard

After you install Localize in your website or app, Localize will begin to automatically detect all of the source language content in your site/app and make it available for translation in your Localize dashboard in the form of “phrases”. Localize will intelligently group together adjacent text in your app, and will create a separate phrase for each logical group of text.

Phrase detection happens once a visitor hits the pages of your site/app. When new phrases are found, they are put into your Pending bin in the Localize dashboard, awaiting your approval before translations can be added.

How to manage your first batch of content

When you first install Localize and visit the pages in your site in a target language, you are likely to find a large number of phrases in your Pending bin, depending on how much content is in your site.
When you move phrases to the Published bin, machine translations are generated (when enabled), and if you are using human translators, they can add/edit translations.

Before simply approving all phrases to be published, we highly recommend that you go through the phrases and decide which ones to publish and which to block, trash or delete. Read about the various phrase states here.

You can use the chart in the Additional Tips section below for more details on managing content in your Pending bin.

How to manage new content going forward

Since most sites/apps change over time, we recommend that you set up a regular schedule to login to your Localize dashboard to approve/block/trash new phrases that are found. You will receive an email notification when new content is found in your site.

Doing this on a regular basis will help to spread out the effort required to keep your translations up-to-date, and will provide your users with timely translations.

You can use the chart in the Additional Tips section below for more details on managing content in your Pending bin.

How to use Localize features to manage your content

There are many Localize features that will help you to optimize your localization efforts, saving you time and money, including:

Minimizing the amount of time you spend maintaining your content
Minimizing how much you pay for human translations
Minimizing how many characters of machine translations you use

Here is an overview of some Localize features that can help you to prep your content for localization and translation.

Modify the HTML in your website to better prepare your content:
- Add variables in a phrase as a means of wrapping dynamic content for deduplication purposes.
- Add a notranslate attribute which tells Localize to ignore that HTML element.
- Add an isolate attribute to a parent element to tell Localize how to group content together.
- Add an ignore attribute to an element so that Localize will ignore the content of the element while allowing it to be grouped with adjacent text.
- Add Labels to your phrases in the HTML of your site, making it easier to categorize content and find it later in your Localize dashboard.
- Add a pluralize attribute to a variable to indicate that the phrase can be singular or plural. Later you can provide the singular and plural versions of that phrase in your dashboard.
Use these features in the Localize dashboard:
- Add terms to your Glossary to inform your translators how to translate specific terminology for your project.
- Define variables in your phrases to identify phrases that contain dynamic content so they can be merged into a single phrase for translation.
- Use the Exclude Phrases by CSS Classes & IDs feature to filter out unwanted content based on specific CSS class and/or ID selectors.
- Use the Block New Phrases by Pattern feature to block specific words or phrases in your website from being brought into the Localize dashboard.
- Use the Disable Phrase Detection by Page feature to ignore parts of your website for which you won't be needing translations.
- Use the Disable Localize by Page if you don't want to display any translations on a page or subdirectory of your site.

Additional tips, recommendations, and resources

List of Localize features you can use for various content types

Use the chart below to see what Localize features may be available for each type of content that you may encounter.

Content Type	Possible Actions
Brand names or product names	- Add to your Glossary
Repeated phrases with just 1 or 2 words that are different	- Define variables in your phrases - Add `<var>` tags to your HTML
A person’s name or email address - embedded in the phrase	- Define a variable in the phrase. - Or add a `tag to your HTML - Use the Block CSS Classes and IDs feature - Add an ignore attribute`
A person’s name or email address - as the entire phrase	- Manually block these phrases - Use the Block CSS Classes and IDs feature - Add a `notranslate` attribute
Pluralized phrases - phrases that change based on a number variable in the phrase.	- Add a `<var>` tag to your HTML with the pluralize attribute
Country names	- You’ll have to decide whether you want these to be translated or not. - If you don’t want them translated, you can block them. - Use the Block CSS Classes and IDs feature
Dates / Times	- Manually block these phrases - Optionally add an external library to your site to handle translating dates/times
Currency	- Manually block these phrases - Optionally add an external library to your site to handle translating currency
SEO-important content (page title, description, keywords, etc.)	Filter your phrases using system labels Assign these phrases to human translators
Miscellaneous ID numbers, SKUs, etc.	- Use the Ignore Phrases of Your Website feature - Use the Block CSS Classes and IDs feature - Add a `notranslate` attribute
Entire pages or folders of content that you don’t want translated	- Use the Ignore Pages of Your Website feature - Use the Disable Localize Widget by URL feature - Add a `notranslate` attribute
Image URLs - from the ‘src’ attribute of the image	- If you want to have different versions of images for different languages, enable the Localize Images option. - Then provide the URL of the alternate image as the translation.
Image URLs - from the ‘alt’ attribute of the image	- Sometimes image URLs are automatically added as `alt` attributes by CMSs. In this case you could either: - Change the `alt` attribute to something more meaningful - Delete the alt attribute - Turn off the ingestion of all `alt` tags (not recommended)
Website URLs	- Manually block these phrases - Use the Block CSS Classes and IDs feature - Add a `<var>` tag to your HTML - Add a `notranslate` attribute
Multiple partial phrases brought in as you are typing	- Sometimes when Localize is active when you are editing your website, you can see this happen. - Use the Block CSS Classes and IDs feature
Non-source language phrases	- See our help doc on this subject

Automatically approving phrases

If you would like to automate the approval of all new incoming phrases, you can set the autoApprove option to true in your Localize.initialize() call. This will automatically move all new phrases from your Pending bin to the Published bin.
See the How to automatically publish machine translations for your project guide for more details.

Translation QA Workflow

To allow for more control of your translation workflow, see our help docs and demo video on the advanced Translation QA workflow tool.