Curator New Feature Spotlight: Translator

Matthew Orr
Experience Engineer
December 10, 2020

Note: This feature is currently only available to our Enterprise customers. Reach out to our team to learn more about plan options.

I’m going to let you in on some behind-the-scenes intel. Not many people know this, but in its spare time, Curator loves to watch episodes of Star Trek and dreams of one day joining Starfleet. While Curator isn’t ready to enlist today, it has been working to prepare itself for that eventuality. The latest challege it took on was to incorporate a universal translator. Curator overheard that InterWorks would be releasing a USS Enterprise version and immediately knew this needed to be one of the first features. We later corrected Curator that the Enterprise version had nothing to do with a starship…

Curator has expanded localization support beyond what we saw in the initial venture to be able to translate nearly every part of its frontend and even administrative backend. While Curator hasn’t taken the time to learn all of the thousands of languages across the known universe – that would take precious time away from watching reruns and attending conventions – it has gained the ability for you to load in the specific languages you need for your users. Once loaded, Curator will do its best to display content in each user’s preferred language automatically with the ability to change the language as needed.

Beaming Languages Aboard

To get started using the this new Enterprise-level translator, navigate to Backend > Settings > Translator to select the languages that need to be translated:

Next, you’ll need to choose words or phrases to translate by navigating to Backend > Settings > Translations. Click the button to add a new translation. From here, you’ll be presented with two choices: Content translation or PortalVerbiage translation.

Use the Content translation option if you wish to translate things like dashboard titles, menu links, notices or other content you’ve added to Curator. Use the PortalVerbiage translation option if you wish to translate things like action icon tooltips, buttons, field labels or other things that come with Curator out of the box.

If you choose Content translation, you’ll be provided with a box to enter a word or phrase to be translated, as well as a field to add translations for each of the languages you chose earlier. Whenever a piece of content, such as a dashboard, is loaded, the translator will check to see if that content contains the specified word or phrase and automatically replace it with the appropriate translation based on which language the user has selected:

On the other … umm … alien lifeform appendage, if you choose PortalVerbiage translation, you’ll be presented with a series of dropdown boxes to locate the Curator term to translate. You’ll also see the same field to add translations for each of the languages you chose earlier:

Setting Phasers to Stun Your Audience

Once you have translations loaded on the backend, you’ll notice that a new menu appears on the frontend to switch languages. By default, Curator will look to see if the language your browser prefers is available in the list and automatically switch to it. However, this can be manually switched if needed: