If your company offers products or services to an international audience, a multilingual site can help you reach your target audience and explore new global markets. This tutorial shows you how to make your Yola site multilingual.
Before you begin
We recommend you create all the essential pages of your site, like Home, About Us, Contacts, and so on, before making your site multilingual. This will ensure that all of your existing pages are created in your new language at once, and nothing is missing.
Adding a new language
To add new languages to your site, follow these steps:
- Click the Main menu button in the top left corner of the Sitebuilder.
- In the Sidebar, click Settings to open the Website settings menu.
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In the Multilingual tab, click the Add language button.
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In the Add new language menu, choose the language you want to translate your site into. (You can scroll down the dropdown menu or type in the first letters and the system will search-as-you-type.)
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Click Submit. The secondary language will be added to your Multilingual tab.
Your site is now multilingual. You can start manually translating your content into the secondary language. You can also replace the images and blocks completely so that different audiences see different content.
Note: After you set your site as multilingual and choose this language in the Language Selector, all the pages will be created with the demo content in that language.
The Language Selector
The Language Selector will automatically appear both on your site and in the top bar of the Sitebuilder after you add the secondary language to simplify the navigation between your languages during site-building. The flag icons are adjusted automatically based on the languages you add.
The Manage languages link brings you directly to the Multilingual tab in the Website settings menu.
On your published site, the Language Selector (language switch) appears automatically and allows visitors to pick a language version of your site.
Translating and managing language-specific content
You can control which content is displayed for certain regions. A multilingual site allows you to display different product offers for specific countries and provide a more tailored experience for users and audiences in each market. You can offer a language-specific product catalog, and use different images, backgrounds, and page/block layouts on your language-specific pages.
You can translate your language-specific content by yourself or by using modern technologies, such as:
- Using translation services available online: Google Translate (free), Gengo (paid), Translate.com (free plan available), ChatGPT, and many more.
- Hiring a human translator at Upwork, Fiverr, or a similar freelancer platform, that will help you polish your copy in the language you require.
Changing the main language
The main language is the language your visitors see when they load your site. English is the main language by default.
If you need to change it, you can do it in the Website settings. Go to Main menu (top left hamburger button in Sitebuilder) > Settings > Multilingual tab.
Or you can use a shortcut: click the Language Selector > Manage languages. This brings you directly to the Multilingual tab of the Website settings.
From there, click the house icon near the language you want to set as main.
Confirm your choice by clicking Submit in a pop-up window and then clicking Submit again in the Website settings.
Remember to publish your website to make those changes live.
Managing your language-specific pages
After adding a new language, the Sitebuilder creates copies of your existing main site language pages.
These new pages have corresponding language settings. You can check these at Pages > Page Settings > Language Code.
Creating new pages in a secondary language
If you have created a new page, for example, About Us in your main site language (English), and you want to have the same Abou Us page in your secondary language, for example, Spanish, there’s an easy way to do it:
- In the Language Selector in the upper left corner of the Sitebuilder, switch to the Spanish language.
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Click Pages and in the Page Manager, click the Translate page button.
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Select English and then select the About Us page.
- Click Submit. You receive a ready-to-translate About Us page in the Spanish version of your site.
You can now manually translate the page into the new language, in our example, it’s Spanish.
Once done, click Publish to make the changes live.
Translating the language-specific navigation
Read about translating your navigation in our dedicated tutorial.
We hope you find this article helpful. If you have any questions left, please contact our Support Team.
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