Zendesk Guide Integration

Zendesk Guide is a help desk software from Zendesk. It helps to organize Knowledge Base articles, FAQs, product details, policies, and other helpful content.

Crowdin integration with Zendesk Guide allows you to provide support to your customers in their native language. When working in Crowdin, your translators can use glossaries, translation memory, and other localization resources you’ve added to your project. This helps keep translations consistent across languages.

How Does The Integration Work

Once you configure the integration, the content from your Zendesk Guide is automatically added to your Crowdin project as XML files. These XML source files are generated based on the source language of your Crowdin project.

If you don’t have any content in your Zendesk Guide localized to the Crowdin project’s source language, the primary language of the Zendesk Guide will be considered the source language, and the integration will add that content to Crowdin.

You can localize articles, names, descriptions of your help desk categories and sections, and dynamic content. These texts are added to the project as separate XML files.

Here’s how your project files will look like after the successful configuration:

A separate folder is created for each category you choose to localize. This folder contains a file with the corresponding category name and description, as well as separate files with the names and descriptions for the sections, and separate files for the articles. The numbers in the folder and file names are the IDs of the categories, sections, and articles in Zendesk Guide. These IDs are visible only to the project owner and managers. Instead of the IDs, your translators and proofreaders will see the real category, folder, and article names.

Once you have uploaded the files to the project, you can invite contributors to translate and proofread the texts. Read more about the translation approaches you can use in Crowdin.

To upload translations to your Zendesk Guide help center, you can either set up a sync schedule to automatically add translations to the help center at set intervals, or you can initiate a sync on demand. The sync schedule is the final step in setting up the integration.

Preparing Zendesk Guide for Integration with Crowdin

If you’re just getting started with Zendesk Guide localization, here are a few things you might find helpful when integrating with Crowdin.

Enabling Zendesk Guide for your Zendesk Account

To start working with the help center, enable Zendesk Guide. Read more about Enabling Zendesk Guide.

Managing Help Center Content

The Zendesk Guide structure consists of categories, sections, and articles. Add all the necessary content to your help center to sync it with your Crowdin project. Read more about Creating and editing articles in your help center and Organizing knowledge base content in categories and sections.

Adding Languages to Help Center

To localize your help center to new target languages, enable them in your Zendesk Guide settings. Read more about Adding Languages to Help Center.

Activating Help Center

Once your help center is ready, you can make it visible to end users. Read more about Activating help center.

Connecting Zendesk Guide with Crowdin

To connect your Zendesk Guide with your Crowdin project, follow these steps:

1. Open your project and go to the Integrations tab.
2. Click on Zendesk Guide in the Integrations list.
3. Specify your help center URL (e.g., https://mycompany.zendesk.com) and click Set Up Integration.
4. Authorize the connection with Crowdin on the Zendesk Guide side.

Zendesk Guide Integration Settings

After successful authorization, you will be redirected back to Crowdin. Click Settings to finish the setup.

In the Zendesk Guide integration settings, you can configure the following parameters:

• Push Translations Every 1/3/6/12/24 hours – configure how often finished translations are pushed to your Zendesk Guide. You can leave this option cleared and use the Sync Now button to manually initiate synchronization as needed.
• Synchronize – select the content to upload from your Zendesk Guide. You can select the Dynamic Content and categories you’d like to upload descriptions and articles from. You can select All Categories or just some of the available ones. Read more about managing your Dynamic Content translations.
• Translate Draft Articles – select this to synchronize articles that haven’t been published.
• Push Translations as Drafts – depending on the publication status of your articles, this option’s behavior may differ. Let’s review the possible scenarios below:
  • Option selected (published articles) – if translated articles were published on Zendesk Guide before the translations were uploaded from Crowdin, the integration will push new translations and unpublish the articles.
  • Option selected (unpublished articles) – if translated articles weren’t published on Zendesk Guide before the translations were uploaded from Crowdin, the integration will push new translations and leave the articles unpublished.
  • Option cleared – the integration will push translations to your Zendesk Guide and won’t change the previous publication status of the articles.

Once you’ve configured the integration, click Save.

Uploading Translations from Zendesk Guide

By default, the translations stored in your Zendesk Guide are only uploaded to Crowdin during the initial sync. To manually upload translations to Crowdin, click on the drop-down toggle on the Sync Now button, and click Upload Translations. The integration will upload existing translations to your Crowdin project.