Transept

For SaaS & support teams

Localize the help center without breaking product terms

Help articles need a clear support voice, exact product UI strings, and zero drift across a hundred pages. Build a product glossary once, batch translate the whole library, run Smart Proofread, ship.

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In context✦

Help centers are the deceptively-hard translation surface. Each article is short (~500 words), but the library is large (100+ articles), the terminology has to be exact (every "Settings" stays "Settings", every "Workspace" stays "Workspace"), and the support voice has to be clear in every language. Generic AI tools translate the words but lose the consistency — by article 30 your product UI labels have three different German renderings. This workflow is built for the at-scale problem: product glossary pinned across the whole library, support styleguide enforced on every article, batch translation across all targets, Smart Proofread to catch any drift before publication.

A help center workflow that holds

Generic translation tools rewrite product UI labels into their literal translations — turning "Settings" into "Configuration", or worse. This workflow keeps the UI exactly where it lives in your app.

  1. Build the product glossary

    Add every UI string that appears in articles — button labels, menu names, screen titles, product feature names. Mark them as "keep verbatim" so the AI doesn’t paraphrase.

  2. Import the articles

    Notion, Markdown, HTML, or direct from your help-center platform (Zendesk, Intercom, HelpScout) via export. The article structure — headings, steps, screenshots — survives.

  3. Apply a support styleguide

    Clear sentence structure. Imperative voice for steps ("Click Settings"). Calm tone for troubleshooting. Save it once and apply across every article.

  4. Batch translate the library

    One queue, many articles, all the target languages. The product glossary and the support styleguide apply across the whole batch.

  5. Smart Proofread, then export

    Catch any UI-term drift. Approve fixes. Export back to your help center platform — or as Markdown for a Git-backed docs site.

Transept translating a help center article with product UI strings pinned in the glossary

Why help centers are a special case

UI terms stay verbatim

"Click Settings → Account" stays exactly that, not "Click on the configuration menu". Glossary pinning makes this the default.

Batch-aware

A hundred articles translated with one shared glossary and one shared styleguide. Consistency by construction.

Round-trip back to your CMS

Notion-out, Markdown-out, or direct API push to your help-center platform via export.

Footnotes✦

Questions, answered without the fluff

  • Yes — export to Markdown or HTML, translate, and re-import via your platform’s standard tools. Direct API push is on the roadmap; for now, the export/import round-trip works cleanly.
  • Screenshots aren’t translated automatically — that requires re-rendering them in your design tool. Transept flags them so you can list out what needs replacing.
  • Batch translation runs in parallel. A 100-article library in Standard mode usually completes in 10–20 minutes; Premium and Publish-Ready run slower but produce ready-to-ship output.
  • Source words × target languages × mode multiplier. A 100-article library averaging 500 words each, into one language at Standard, runs about 50K credits.
  • Yes — export articles to Markdown or HTML, translate in Transept, re-import via your platform’s standard tools. Direct API integration is on the roadmap; for now the export/import round-trip works cleanly and most teams run it on a monthly cadence.
  • Screenshots aren’t translated automatically — that requires re-rendering them in your design tool with localized UI. Transept flags every screenshot reference so you can list them out for design replacement. Many teams ship localized articles with source-language screenshots in the first wave and replace them on a follow-up cadence.
  • Batch translation runs in parallel. A 100-article library averaging 500 words each, into one language at Standard mode, completes in 15–20 minutes. Add 5–10 minutes per additional language.
  • Re-run the batch when source articles change — Transept detects which articles have new content and only retranslates those. Auto-sync on change is on the roadmap; for now a manual re-run on a release cadence is the pattern most teams use.
  • Use Lokalise (or your TMS) as the source of truth for UI labels and export them into a glossary for Transept. The help center articles will then use the same localized labels that your app shows.
Related✦

Keep reading around this workflow

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Localize the help center before the launch

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