Skip to Content

Why Do I Need To Localize My Knowledge Base?

Estimated Reading Time: 6 Minutes

A knowledge base is an enormous storehouse to collect, organize and manage all the knowledge and information of a company. It is a fundamental resource that provides staff and customers with a basic reference and the first point of contact, for the most common problems. As your audience expands across the world, localization becomes more important than ever. If you're looking for a simple and clean solution to localize your knowledge base, this article is for you.

Localized Knowledge Base

Localization in a Knowledge Base

Localization refers to the method of transforming the look and contents of your knowledge base to the local language of the target audience. Localizing your knowledge base can help you target the global audience and get effective results on your brand expansions. It is the process of adapting the knowledge base into a different linguistic and cultural context - involving much more than the simple translation of the text. When you start using multilingual knowledge base software, it expands your audience reach almost immediately. Moreover, it can have certain far-reaching effects, including reduced churn rates, enhanced support experience, and customer satisfaction ratio.

What is the need to localize the knowledge base?

When you have a global clientele for your business, having a localized language knowledge base would eliminate many hindrances faced by your customers in engaging with your single-language knowledge base for support.

As data suggest:

  • 72.1% of consumers spend most or all of their time on websites in their own language.
  • 72.4% of consumers said they would be more likely to buy a product with information in their own language.
  • 56.2% of consumers said that the ability to obtain information in their own language is more important than price.

Data clearly states that your first strategic move should be to localize your business website and knowledge base in different languages. With PHPKB you can have a language-specific knowledge base. Your Knowledge Base can be translated/localized to as many languages as you select. The localized knowledge base would include categories, articles, news, and knowledge base items in the language of choice.

How to localize your knowledge base?

The decision to localize your knowledge base in one or more languages should be made from the beginning, in the design phase. If your company’s website is already available in multiple languages, it follows that your knowledge base should be available in the same languages as your website.

If you have the multi-language edition of PHPKB software, you have the ability to set up your knowledge base in English as well as in a few other supported languages, say Spanish, German, and Japanese. You have the facility to choose any language as the BASE Language so that whenever an article is added to the BASE language, it is also replicated across other languages.

The reader would choose to switch between the different languages using a 'language selection dropdown' in the public section of your knowledge base. Upon selecting the required language from the list, the support articles would be displayed in the chosen language (If you have translated the articles into the chosen language).

How Can A Multilingual Knowledge Base Software Help In Localization?

A multilingual knowledge base software has excellent features which focus on the core areas of knowledge management. It will help you to localize your KB content as and when needed effectively. Each knowledge result will be unique in its own language, allowing you to increase the customer experience ratio on a massive scale. For instance, if you want to reach out to a certain language community and showcase your products, you need a multilingual knowledge base software like PHPKB. It offers a host of features to set up and manage your knowledge base in multiple languages with support for multibyte characters, RTL languages, and auto locale detection to ensure that your KB content and product details load in the preferred language of the customers.

What is locale detection?

The localization capability in PHPKB knowledge base software can detect and load the knowledge base in the customer's preferred language (depending on the customer's login location or browser location settings). The language of the users that are visiting your knowledgebase will automatically be detected and the knowledge base content will be served to them in that language, provided that language is enabled in your knowledge base.

Supported Languages

PHPKB provides easy-to-use tools to localize your content in 49 different languages, which helps you to provide support to customers from all over the world! Here is the complete list of languages supported by PHPKB:

  1. Afrikaans
  2. Albanian
  3. Arabic
  4. Azerbaijani
  5. Belarusian
  6. Bulgarian
  7. Catalan
  8. Chinese Simplified
  9. Chinese Traditional
  10. Croatian
  11. Czech
  12. Danish
  13. Dutch
  14. English
  15. Estonian
  16. Filipino
  17. Finnish
  18. French
  19. German
  20. Greek
  21. Hebrew
  22. Hindi
  23. Hungarian
  24. Icelandic
  25. Indonesian
  26. Irish
  27. Italian
  28. Japanese
  29. Korean
  30. Latvian
  31. Lithuanian
  32. Macedonian
  33. Malay
  34. Maltese
  35. Norwegian
  36. Persian
  37. Polish
  38. Portuguese
  39. Romanian
  40. Russian
  41. Serbian
  42. Slovak
  43. Slovenian
  44. Spanish
  45. Swedish
  46. Thai
  47. Turkish
  48. Ukrainian
  49. Vietnamese

Undoubtedly, a knowledge base software with advanced localization features can do wonders when it comes to offering the best support experience to your customers. It is not just about the translation and conversion methods; there is more to it. Here are some vital points to consider while understanding the need for a good multilingual knowledge base software:

  • While creating/modifying a language, you can assign translators to that language. This makes it easy for you to automatically assign translators to the articles of that language. All of the added Translators will receive an invitation via email whenever there is a new or updated article for translation.
  • A multilingual knowledge base will enable you to share knowledge in multiple languages with the end users, both internally as well as externally.
    • The internal knowledge base serves as a central hub where you can store, maintain, and share knowledge with your employees. An internal knowledge base is created by an organization strictly for team members to access private or confidential knowledge as needed. Either on-premise or in the cloud, you can think of it as a digital library of all the information your employees.
    • An external knowledge base with localization will make your content look naturalistic to a multilingual and multicultural global audience.
  • Localization involves translation, interpreting, and transcription. PHPKB software has features to automatically replicate your knowledge articles and categories from one language to the other. Not just replication, it also offers notification features where language translators are notified as soon as there are new translation jobs pending for them in their respective languages.
  • A localized knowledge base will also help you in increasing the traffic to a website with organic search results in the right target language.
  • Last but not the least, you need to think about financial concerns like ROI. You cannot opt for any knowledge base software just for the sake of it; there are significant financial risks involved, which is why you need to choose wisely. A standard and exceedingly productive knowledge management software like PHPKB will ensure that you achieve massive success and effective returns while you localize your content.

Create A Strong Localized Knowledge Base

As an endnote, what you must remember is how brilliantly your chosen knowledge base software can perform in order to target the right audience. You may miss out on certain crucial points, but your knowledge base software will ensure that your content is right for the targeted language community. PHPKB is one such amazing software that can take the extra load off your shoulders. It will perform outstandingly to guarantee success when it comes to offering multilingual customer support to a global audience.

Why Do I Need To Localize My Knowledge Base?
  • COMMENT