Working with multiple languages

Many large websites display content in several languages. Optimizely has powerful support for multi-language management, including the possibility 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 Optimizely know which language to display to visitors? Optimizely 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.

Enabling content languages

Usually a website has a default or master content language set up at the time of installation. In addition to the master language, your website may be set up with multiple other content languages. An administrator enables languages; see Managing website languages.

Administrators can also set up different access rights to different languages. This means that you may have access to English and French content, but not to German and Spanish.

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 in the upper right corner. Select My Settings > Display Options tab. At the Personal Language drop-down list, select the language of your choice, and click Save.

Optimizely Commerce and multiple languages

See Multi-language management in the Commerce section to work with multiple languages if you have Optimizely 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.