Creating multi-language site navigation

If you have a multilingual site, it is best to have the navigation menu translated for each language. This way, your English visitors (for example) will see the navigation menu in English on the respective site version. While your French visitors will see the navigation menu in French when they are in the respective site version. 

Here is how to translate the navigation menu items' titles:

  1. Choose the site version using the Language selector. For this example, we would like to create navigation for the French version of the site:
    userlmn_795182f0b9f58247e4e1b8e164b3747e.png
  2. Click on the Navigation tab in the upper horizontal menu of the Sitebuilder.
  3. In Navigation Settings, hover over the navigation item you’d like to translate and click Settings:
    userlmn_9d5e95160166af6bf1823c7d12a7eae9.png
  4. Enter the French page title as you would like it to appear in the navigation:
    userlmn_af727c188c7d2e2ba1e391c817c6ade8.png
  5. Click Submit.
  6. Repeat these steps for the rest of the menu items.
  7. Click Submit.

Your French site version menu should look similar to this:

userlmn_fc07594c230fca90d4a69b1f6103db89.png

Make sure to publish your site to make the changes live.

Make the navigation local

If you have a global navigation menu for one language, you can make this navigation local for a particular page in this language. Here’s how to proceed:

  1. Go to the page where you want to create page-specific navigation. Hover your cursor over the existing navigation item and right-click.
  2. Click on Convert to a local element

multi-language_7.png

 

 

Continue editing the navigation. All changes in navigation will be visible on this page only.

 

Create a local navigation item

Here’s how to create a new language-specific navigation item:

1. Go to your language-specific homepage (for this example, Home-FR) and hover your cursor over the navigation area to activate the Navigation menu.

2. Click on the navigation menu and then clikc Navigation settings:

userlmn_645d53db5f9969b9648ce39879e4e029.png

3. To add a new language-specific page to the navigation, click the round + button:

multi-language_9.png

 

4. In the Item Settings menu, choose the following options from drop-down lists:

Click action > Open page and Language > French.


5. Replace Home-FR with Page d’accueil (Homepage in French):

 

multi-language_10.png

 

6. Click Submit

7. The link to your Home-FR homepage with a title Page d'accueil will appear in the navigation menu.

Repeat these steps for your other pages in this language.


8. Click Save and Publish.

 

Turning local navigation into the global navigation

You can revert the change and choose to show global navigation on pages where you previously created local navigation.

To do this, hover your cursor over the navigation, and right-click the area. Click the Revert to global element button:

 

multi-language_11.png

 

This way, you would enable your global navigation that was there before.

Important: Repeat these steps for each individual page on which you have enabled local navigation.

When offering a multilingual product or service, you may think about giving your users an option to view your content in a different language. 

You can enable the option to choose among multiple languages so that your global audience can choose which language they want to use. 

When you switch to the multilingual site, your Header will automatically show a language switch that allows visitors to pick a language version of your site:

switching-lang-1.png

This way, your visitors will be able to choose the language version of your site:

switching-lang-2.png

Please note: the Language Switcher in the main website navigation doesn't work while in Sitebuilder mode. Use the Language Switcher in the upper left corner of the Sitebuilder to switch between language versions:

switching-lang-3.png

For more details on how to create a multilingual site, visit this tutorial.

Other helpful articles

Managing navigation in the header

Creating multi-language site navigation

Adding logo and navigation to your site

Expanding your navigation

Other helpful articles

Adding a Language code (hreflang tag)

Switching a language in website navigation

Building a page with language-specific blocks

Adding languages to your Online Store

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