How to Manage Multilingual Content in a CMS
IntermediateQuick Answer
TL;DR
Managing multilingual content in a CMS requires four decisions: choosing a localization strategy (field-level or document-level), configuring locales and fallback languages, establishing a translation workflow, and tracking content parity across languages. The right approach depends on how much locale variants diverge from each other and how many languages you support.
Key Takeaways
- Field-level localization stores all language variants in one document; document-level creates separate documents per locale — each has trade-offs.
- Configure fallback languages so users see content in a related locale when their exact locale isn't available.
- Translation workflows should define clear states: needs translation, in translation, in review, published.
- Machine translation (DeepL, Google Translate) speeds up first drafts; professional services (Smartling, Lokalise) handle quality-critical content.
- Track translation coverage to catch stale or missing locale content before it reaches users.