The Bablic Dashboard is where you can make back-end customizations to your site. Today we’ll focus on the Languages and Settings tabs.
You access these tabs on the left vertical navigation bar once you’ve signed-in to your Bablic account.
Languages
The language page displays as follows.
You’ll see the original language of your site, together with all your other languages.
If the original language is represented by more than one flag (e.g. Spanish, Portuguese or English), you can change the flag of choice by clicking on the little arrow next to the flag.
For each language you add to the site, you can choose from Translate Automatically, Translate Per Request, and No Machine Translation, on a per language basis. For instance, if you choose Translate Automatically, Bablic will automatically crawl your site and automatically translate any content it finds. The machine translation will not over-write any manual changes or translation you have made, or any professional translation you have purchased.
If you choose “Translate per request”, you’ll have to manually submit pages for translation. You can do so from the “Pages” section (Instructions here)
If you want to add another language, click on Add Language.
Bablic will present you with the following screen.
Choose your language and click Go For it. Your new language will now be visible.
On the far right, you can publish or unpublish each language individually. This means that you can work on translation without a specific language being visible to your users, and then publish it whenever it’s ready.
Lastly, take note of the site glossary. Use this feature if there are words needing specific translation (e.g. brand names, technical terminology etc.) or that shouldn’t be translated at all.
Click on Add New Items, enter your word, and click add.
Now you can enter the translation for that word in each language.
Now on to the Settings tab.
Settings
Under the settings tab, you have General, Language Selection, SEO and Advanced Configuration.
General
Your site name is visible, together with the base URL. Bablic will only crawl your base URL to retrieve content.
Language Selection
Under languages selection, you have Auto Detect, Default Language, Force Refresh Language and Customize Widget.
By setting the Auto Detect function to on, you’re letting Bablic know to automatically detect the browser language of a visitor, and display the translated site that matches the language. For example, if a visitor visits your site and the browser is Spanish, your site will display in Spanish.
Sometimes the browser language isn’t detectable, or the browser’s language is not available on the site. In this case Bablic will revert to the Default Language, which will be displayed automatically. If you disable the Auto Detect function, the website will automatically appear in the Default Language regardless of anything else.
You can also toggle Force Refresh language, on and off. If it’s on, Bablic will automatically refresh the page every time the user changes his/her language.
Lastly, you can access your language switcher widget directly from here using the link on the right hand side, which will open the customize widget popup directly in Bablic’s visual editor.
Note, you can also verify here that Bablic code was correctly copy and pasted onto your site (using the verify button above the code snippet)
SEO
This section is for Plus Plan accounts and above.
With this feature enabled, you’ll be able to increase your global audience by making all languages on the site visible and indexed in all search engines. This will improve your ranking in any local search results (according to your selected and added languages. For example: if you have Italian language on your site, your site will be indexed in Google Italy).
Simply click the button on the right to start the setup
The following screen will appear:
Next, you’ll need to choose the integration which fits your website’s platform. It’s easy – as you can see yourself, if you have access to your server pick SDK and if you don’t, pick Bablic’s SmartProxy and click next (You can find more information about this choice in this post)
In my case, I’m using a WordPress website, which means I have access to my server. Therefore, the integration I require is Bablic’s SDK.
You can download Bablic’s plugin using the link shown above and after you’ve installed it on your server, come back here to verify it by click the Verify button. Bablic will check to see if your installation was successful or not.
After verifying a successful installation and clicking next, you’ll be taken to the language URL structure screen.
Here you can set how each language will appear in the URL of your website.
Choose between Query String, Sub Directories, Sub Domains or Custom Domains settings — upon selection, you’ll be taken to your chosen structure specific settings. As always, feel free to contact the support team ([email protected]) if you require additional help.
Advanced Configuration
The majority of you won’t use the Advanced Configuration features.
For those who will, you’ll be able to add a staging environment, setup multi-domains, define query string or hash-string parameters, and even exclude certain elements. If you have any questions about this section, please contact us at [email protected]
Here you can also have access to our API documentation if you want to integrate additional components via API.
Finally, after you made all the necessary changes inside the advanced configuration section, you’ll have to replace Bablic’s code snippet on your site, to make sure this changes will take effect. In case you reached this point without Bablic’s snippet pasted on your site, don’t worry, simply copy the snippet you see here and paste it onto your site. By the way, if you haven’t done that yet, do that now, to start reaping the benefits of Bablic.
That’s it – a full overview of the Languages and Settings pages in the Dashboard.
If you have any questions or need help, leave us a comment below or contact us.