Languages

#Adding languages

Open Languages and add the languages you need. The default language lives at the root (/about); others get a prefix (/de/about). Prefer /en/about too? Turn on Prefix the default language. Changing languages or the default updates every URL, and the old addresses redirect.

#Translating a page

Open a page and use the language menu in the toolbar:

• Translate into Deutsch — with the assistant set up, Claude translates the text and the new version opens as a draft for review. Only words are sent for translation; block structure, links, images and design tokens are copied unchanged.
• Add version / Copy for manual translation — copies the page as a draft for someone to translate.

Each translation is linked to the original, so you can switch between versions, and pages are placed under the translated parent in a tree. The entries list has a language switch at the top.

A translation starts with its own place in search: it does not inherit a canonical URL or a noindex from the original. Give it its own slug and SEO title, written for that language: /de/preise, /fr/tarifs.

#URLs per language

Tree pages take their URL from their parents, so /de/vergleich/wordpress is a page wordpress under a German page vergleich. A collection with a fixed pattern can have another one per language with routes in its YAML:

route: /whats-new/{slug}
routes:
  de: /neuigkeiten/{slug}
  fr: /nouveautes/{slug}

A language without a pattern of its own uses route, under its prefix. A collection's feed follows the same pattern.

#On the site

• <html lang> and dir follow the page (right-to-left languages included).
• Each page lists its live translations as hreflang links, with an x-default, also in the sitemap.
• Links follow the visitor. A link to /pricing, written in a block, a template, a menu or rich text, leads to /de/preise on a German page once that version is live, and stays on the original until then. A link with an hreflang attribute means what it says and is left alone: use it on a language switcher.
• Menus show the visitor's language where a translation is live, and each menu item can have its own label per language (Navigation).
• Forms have their wording per language, and answer in it (Forms).
• A missing page under /de/ shows the 404 template in German.
• Text from the code (the skip link, a form's error messages) and dates (entry.date|date) follow the page's language.
• /sitemap.xml is an index of /sitemap-en.xml, /sitemap-de.xml and so on once more than one language has pages.
• A Repeat over Languages makes a language switcher: bind a Link's label to item.name (or item.locale), its URL to item.url, its hreflang and lang attributes to item.locale, and the current state to item.current. In PHP, cms_translations() returns the same list.

Languages without a live version of the page link to their home page instead, and are left out if that does not exist either.

#Templates and components

Templates and components exist once, so a design change reaches every language. The words in them come from a global set, which holds a value per language: switch language at the top of the set, and bind a block to it with globals.ui.sign_in. A value can be part of a sentence: {globals.ui.sold_by} {globals.company.display_name}.

#A page that stays in one language

To show content in the original language on purpose, publish a version with a short note in the reader's language and tick noindex. It stays out of hreflang and the sitemap, so search engines keep showing the original. This site's changelog works this way.