How to translate non-page content in Kentico

Question

We recently upgraded our Kentico 8.2 instance to 9.0 and are now focusing on localizing our site into two additional cultures. The textual content of our site is primarily stored in one of three places:

• Editable regions
• Text fields in custom page types
• Custom tables

We're using the Kentico EMS license and would like to leverage the built-in Translation Services app in order to translate content in each of these locations, however it appears that it only supports with content within editable regions. I know Kentico has an input control for translating text boxes but it forces the content editor to create a distinct resource key for it; we simply have so much content I'm concerned this will get out of control for editors.

Additionally, we had considered migrating some of our content into pages but they don't logically fit there, and there are some complex relationships that would cause duplicate content so I'd really prefer to keep the content where it is. The other thought I had was to build either a custom module or custom form control to do some dirty work under the covers but didn't want to reinvent the wheel if there was already a known approach.

Is there a Kentico recommended approach, or workaround, to managing content translations within custom tables and page type fields?

Answer 1

For the custom page types and custom tables, you can change those text fields to localized text fields at the field definition and it will allow you to enter different values per language without a resource key. This is the best route IMHO for page types and custom table translation. Although this still does not allow for "automatic" or built-in translation.

Answer 2

You can use Translation in Kentico to translate page type fields and send them for translation. Check this documentation page for an example. It can be more complex at first, but it should do the trick for you. I have just tested creating a simple translation request for my page type and the resulting XLF file contained all page type fields.

For custom tables I will have to dissapoint you because custom tables in Kentico are not culture specific. If performance is important for you the best way to create translations is to add CultureCode field to your table in order to specify which culture the item is for.

For example you can have table with columns: ItemID, Text, CultureCode

And then the data would look like:

1, Dog, en-US

2, Hund, ge-GE

3, Pes, cs-CZ

If you would want to go even step further I would recommend to create this not as a custom table, but as a Custom class which will sit inside a custom module for which you can create your own interface which would allow editors to easily create all culture versions for the items.

Answer 3

I am not sure what do you mean by content translation in page type fields - there is support for translating page type fields. You can find example on sample site in Kentico installation. (The site is called DancingGoat - see image example for page type field localization in english and spanish language).