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Publishing Translations

Publish translations with Transifex Live and make them available to your website visitors.

Nina Eleftheriadou avatar
Written by Nina Eleftheriadou
Updated over a year ago

With Transifex Live, you can publish translations (take translations live) at any time and make them available to your visitors without needing your engineering team to deploy anything.

📝 Note: You must install the Transifex Live JavaScript snippet for translations to appear on your site. Please see the setup instructions if you haven’t installed the Live snippet.


Publishing translations

Administrators and Project maintainers are the ones who can publish translations.

To publish translations:

  1. Click Publish in the Transifex Live sidebar to open up the Publish panel.

  2. Choose whether you want to publish translations to your production (live) site or staging site by clicking on the corresponding tab at the top.

  3. Select which language(s) you’d like to take live.

    publish-language.png#asset:1055

  4. At the bottom, choose whether to publish all or only reviewed translations.

  5. Hit Publish to production or Publish to staging.

When you open the Publish widget, next to already published languages, there is an indicator confirming which languages are live. This indicator will be shown in green:

updateInfo.png#asset:9249

Whenever an already published language is deselected to be removed from the list of published languages, the system will return a message informing you that the specific language will no longer be accessible by your end users in your web app/website:

updateInfo2.png#asset:9250

⚠️Warning: If you publish only reviewed translations, ensure that your translations are marked as reviewed. Otherwise, if they are left as translated but unreviewed, they will not be served on your website; instead, the original English source will be available.

Your translations will typically be visible on your site in under a minute or less.

Updating translations and publishing new languages

Repeat the steps above to update translations or add additional languages to your site. It’s important to note that you should check all the languages you want to show to your visitors each time you hit publish.

For example, if you initially published French and German translations and then added Spanish translations, you should have all three languages checked when you launch Spanish or update translations for any of those languages.

Unpublishing translations

To unpublish a language, uncheck and publish it to your production or staging site again.


Language picker

By default, Transifex will place a language picker (note: you need to publish at least one translation language) at the bottom left corner of your website. This lets your visitors select the language they’d like to see your website in. (Note that by default, Transifex Live auto-detects your browser’s locale and displays your site in that language if translations are available.)

language-picker.png#asset:1056

You can change the location of the picker by going to Settings in the sidebar and selecting a different language picker position for your production and staging sites.

language-picker-position.png#asset:1057

If you’d like to customize the location and appearance of the language picker, you can do so by following the instructions here.

If you'd like to disable the Language Picker, then you can follow the steps below:

  1. Open live editor

  2. Go to settings

  3. Select the “Do not display a picker” option from the list.

Disable_Language_Picker.png#asset:6687


Right-to-left layout

If you translate your website into languages that read from right to left (RTL), you can set Transifex Live to display those languages correctly for your RTL visitors.
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To do this:

  1. From the Transifex Live sidebar, click on Settings at the bottom.

  2. Check the box next to Switch the layout direction for RTL languages.

    rtl_setting.png#asset:2700

  3. Click Save to apply the changes.


How are translations served?

When you publish translations, your translation text is uploaded to our Content Delivery Network (CDN) hosted on AWS CloudFront and then served to visitors when they come to your site. Using a CDN ensures both high uptime and low latency.

One significant benefit to using Transifex Live (versus a proxy solution, for example) is that our CDN only serves the translated text, not your site itself. This means you don’t give up control of your site to a third party, and sensitive information like credit card numbers never passes through our servers.

📝 Note: If a Live snippet is installed on a domain not defined in the resource settings, then, by default, it will get served translations from the production domain; more info can be found here ("Can I use Transifex Live with a staging server?").

Further, if you'd like to force the serving of translations that have been published to a staging server, then please follow the instructions here ("Working with staging servers").


💡Tip

Looking for more help? Get support from our Transifex Community Forum!

Find answers or post to get help from Transifex Support and our Community.

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