Creating Content in Multiple Languages

If your business operates in more than one region, you may need to tailor your marketing content to match each customer's location and language preferences. You could do this by making your campaign content dynamic using Handlebars or Catalog. Or you could use locales — our friendly interface for managing multiple region/language versions of a template.

A locale is a code you can use to identify a user's language and/or country in order to determine what content is most relevant to them. With locales, you can create multiple region-specific versions of a template, and then Iterable can send the right localized version of the campaign to each of your users at send time — no complex if/else coding required!

# Why use locales?

Locales make it easy for team members and outside contributors — including folks with little or no coding proficiency — to collaborate on content creation.

In order to translate and localize a campaign for separate audiences around the world, you could create a single template version with dynamic content that determines each user's location and displays the corresponding content. But this is a pretty code-heavy approach that doesn't work for everyone. Your team or the team responsible for translating and localizing your content may find it challenging to work with this kind of complex code.

With locales, you can create region-specific versions of a template that are all associated with the same template ID — so performance metrics are all tracked in the same place, just like they would be if you localized the template with dynamic content. If you work with an outside translation service, you can share these versions with translators, and they can upload the translated content to your template.

Locales give your team the benefit of shared templates with the flexibility to determine how, when, and if users receive a localized version of your campaign content.

# How it works

At send time, Iterable checks each user's profile for the locale field. If this field is set, Iterable will send the version of the campaign template that matches their locale.

What about if a user doesn't have a locale field on their profile or there is a mismatch between the user's locale field and the available content (for example, if a user's locale is pt-PT and you haven't set up a Portuguese locale)?

When a user has no locale on their user profile, Iterable will send them the default localization of the campaign.

You can use the Locale overrides section of your Project Settings page to tell Iterable whether or not to send the default localization of your campaign when there's a mismatch between a user's locale and the available content:

Turn these settings on if you want users whose locales aren't supported in your campaigns to receive the default version anyway. (In the example above, a Portuguese speaker would receive the campaign in your project's default language/localization.) Leave these settings off if you don't want users whose locales don't match any of the locales you've set up to receive the campaign in a language/localization that doesn't match their preference.

With locale overrides ON

• Users with no locale — Will receive the project default localization ✅
• Users with a locale mismatch — Will receive the project default localization ✅

With locale overrides OFF

• Users with no locale — Will receive the project default localization ✅
• Users with a locale mismatch — Will be excluded from the send (this will register as a send skip on their user profile) ❌

# Creating localized versions of a template

Once you've set up at least one locale for your project, you can start creating region-specific versions of your templates for the different locales you want to send them to. Click the locales dropdown menu in the template editor and select each additional locale you want to add to your template. Each time you add a new locale to a template, Iterable copies all the template content from your default locale to create the new version.

You can use the locales menu to select, edit, preview, and send proofs of each version of the template to yourself or a teammate. You can also call GET /api/templates/email/get to export the different template locales to a translation service.

# Using locales in experiments

When you create an experiment from a template that has more than one locale, you'll be able to configure multiple locale versions of each experiment variation on the Design step of setting up your experiment. Locales work the same way in experiments as they do in a regular campaign — users will receive the correct locale version of the experiment variant they're sent.

When you launch your experiment, Iterable will choose an overall winner between your experiment variations, then send all localizations of that variation to the remaining users.

# Using locales in journeys

The locales feature reduces the need to filter users by location or language in your journeys, since you can include multiple locale versions of the same campaign in a single message tile. Users who reach the tile will receive different localized versions of the same campaign (with the same campaign ID).

You can review and edit the different locale versions of a campaign in the message tile.