Internationalisation (i18n) in Styla
TLDR: You can create and manage content for each of your website's locales with a separate Styla account. There is a process in Styla Editor to streamline publishing to multiple locales with the same language and also translate page content from one language to another.
Account Structure:
Styla creates an account per locale on your website. So if you have three language versions for Switzerland, one for Germany and both the US and the UK with one language version, this is how your account structure will look like:
youraccount-de-ch
youraccount-fr-ch
youraccount-it-ch
youraccount-de-de
youraccount-en-gb
youraccount-en-us
The accounts will be created inside one Styla organisation "youraccount" so that a person can access all of them in Styla Editor, switch and copy pages between them.
Each of these accounts can use a separate source of product data so you have products with descriptions in German and prices in CHF for Switzerland while English and GBP for the UK.
The i18n feature:
Once the accounts are set up, you can start creating content. You create your pages in one account first and then copy them into the other accounts. Once you copy them, you translate the content into other languages for other locales. And you still want to change content in all locales with a specific language at once. The Editor covers for all these scenarios.
Here's what you can do with it:
Create copies of a page in all or just some Styla accounts covering your website's locales. The copies can be published automatically in all of them at once. Such pages remain connected to each other and alternate links/hreflang tags are generated for them automatically to be used by search engines.
All the copies that you create this way contain modules that are linked to modules in the other accounts with the same language. This means that if you translate text in such a module from English into German, the changes will be reflected on all accounts with the language German, but not in those with English or French.
You can still manage metadata and URL for each of the page copies separately. So you can update page title, description and page slug to match your translation and specific locale too. The updated slugs will be reflected in the alternate links/hreflang tags provided automatically for search engines.
You can still drag and drop extra modules that will only be displayed on one specific account/locale. So while the rest of modules on a page are linked across the language, the ones that are not linked will only be displayed in this specific language-country combination.
You can also remove a linked module from a page. It will no longer be displayed on this specific account but will remain linked on the other accounts using this language.
If you have "detached" one of the copies from the rest by adding or removing single modules from them, you can sync these changes back to all or just some of them. You click the "sync" button and the changes are automatically synced ie. modules added or removed accordingly and the content updated.
This is useful for extensive changes of pages that have been created a while ago. You don't need to create a new linked page from scratch.
See the i18n feature in action:
The video below shows the whole internationalisation workflow:
- a page is first created in the Editor
- copies are created in several other Styla accounts
- the content is translated and automatically reflected on all the versions using the same language
- a copy in one account is "detached" by changing the modules' structure
- finally, the changes from this account are synced back to the rest of the accounts sharing its language.
Products in page copies created with the i18n feature are not updated automatically using the various sources of product data. Which means that if you copy a page from your EN-GB account into DE-CH and DE-DE, you will need to re-add products manually to have the language and currencies matching your Swiss and German locales.