Key Concepts
Understanding articles, translations, sync status, and language coverage in Translate Desk.
Before you start translating, it helps to understand how Translate Desk organizes and tracks your content. This guide explains the core concepts you'll work with every day.
Articles
An article is a single piece of content from your Intercom Help Center. Each article has a title, description, and body content. When you connect Intercom, Translate Desk automatically imports all your published articles.
Articles maintain their original structure, including HTML formatting, links, images, and other elements. This ensures your translated content looks identical to the original.
Translations
A translation is a version of an article in a specific target language. Each article can have multiple translations, one for each language you want to support.
Translations are stored separately from the source article. This means you can update the original article in Intercom without affecting your translations until you're ready to sync changes.
Translation Status
Every translation has a status that indicates what action, if any, is needed:
- Needs Translation: The article hasn't been translated into this language yet, or the source article was updated and needs re-translation.
- Ready to Push: Translation is complete and ready to be published to Intercom.
- In Sync: The translation exists in Intercom and matches the current version in Translate Desk.
- Needs Sync: The source article was updated in Intercom, and the translation may be outdated.
The dashboard shows you how many articles are in each status, helping you prioritize your translation work. Learn more about What do the translation statuses mean?.
Language Coverage
Language coverage measures how much of your help center is available in each target language. It's calculated as the percentage of articles that have translations in a given language.
For example, if you have 100 articles and 75 have French translations, your French coverage is 75%. This metric helps you track progress toward your multilingual goals.
You can view coverage metrics in the dashboard to identify which languages need more attention. Learn more about How do I track language coverage?.
Sync Status
Sync status tracks the relationship between your articles in Translate Desk and their counterparts in Intercom. The system automatically detects when:
- New articles are published in Intercom
- Existing articles are updated
- Translations are pushed to Intercom
- Translations need to be updated
This automatic syncing ensures you're always working with the latest content. Learn more about How does automatic syncing work?.
Collections
Collections are how Intercom organizes articles into groups. Translate Desk preserves this structure, so when you translate articles, they maintain their collection relationships in each language.
If an article belongs to a collection in English, its translations will belong to the same collection in other languages. This keeps your help center organized across all languages.
Next Steps
Now that you understand the core concepts, you're ready to start translating. Check out the Getting Started guide to translate your first article.