Help Center Translation for Software

Quick answer — Translate help articles by traffic rather than by category. The top fifty usually cover most of the volume, and a localized help centre deflects support tickets in that language from the first week.

Vitra.ai Universe ships product and customer content in every language.

Traffic decides, not the tree

Help centres are organised by product area because that is how they were written. Usage does not follow that shape.

Pull the page views. In most help centres a small fraction of articles carries the large majority of reads, and that list rarely matches the navigation. Setup, billing, login problems and one or two feature guides tend to dominate. Translate that list first and you have covered most of the demand before touching the long tail.

What to leave alone, at least at first

Deprecated content is worth naming. Every help centre has articles about features that no longer exist, and translating them multiplies a maintenance problem rather than solving one.

Screenshots are the recurring cost

An article translated perfectly, illustrated with an English interface, tells a reader the product is not really available in their language.

That is image translation work rather than text work, and it is why localized screenshots get skipped. The cheaper alternative is to write help content that describes the action rather than pointing at a label, which survives both translation and a redesign.

Keeping it current

Help content changes with every release, so a batch translation is stale within a quarter.

Translate on the change instead of in batches — the argument in continuous localization — with segment-level memory so an edited paragraph costs a paragraph rather than a page.

Set a review band by risk: billing and security content reaches a person, ordinary how-tos publish once quality control clears them.

The number that justifies it

Ticket deflection in the target language, measured against the month before.

If it does not move, the wrong articles were translated — which is usually a sign the list came from the navigation rather than the analytics.

FAQ

Which help articles should be translated first? The top articles by page views, not the top of the navigation. Setup, billing and login content usually dominate reads, and that list rarely matches how the help centre is organised.

Should screenshots be localized too? Ideally yes, because an English interface in a translated article signals the product is not really available in that language. Writing help text that describes the action rather than naming a label reduces the need.

How do you stop a translated help centre going stale? Translate on the change rather than in batches, with segment-level memory so an edited paragraph costs a paragraph. Batch translation is out of date within a quarter of a normal release cadence.

What measures whether help centre translation worked? Support ticket deflection in that language compared with the previous month. If it does not move, the article list probably came from the navigation rather than from traffic data.