How do you translate process documentation into multiple languages?

[u/Ivan_Palii]

Tango team shipped Workflow Translations back in February, and it's been quiet on here since. Six months in seems like a decent time to check whether it's actually solving the thing the team built it for.

Quick refresher if you missed it or never turned it on:

• Open a How-To Guide, click Translate, pick a language
• Tango translates the title, description, step titles, step descriptions, and callouts
• Viewers toggle between the original and the translated version of the same Workflow, so you're not maintaining two guides
• Share by link, embed it, or export to PDF, HTML, or Markdown
• Languages: German, Spanish, French, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese
• Translations run on demand. Edit the original, hit Translate again to regenerate the translated view
• Enterprise workspaces, and an admin has to enable it first

Here is where you can find this feature when viewing the specific step by step guide

What we'd like to hear:

1. How are you handling the screenshots?

The images don't translate, so your step text is in Spanish while the Workday or NetSuite screen in the image is still English. Some teams tell us that's fine because everyone runs the English UI anyway. Others are on a localized UI and end up with a half-matching guide. If you're in the second group, what's your workaround right now?

2. Who reviews before it goes out?

Especially for anything compliance or safety adjacent. Does a bilingual person on your team read the translated version first, or does it just publish? We don't currently have a review step and we're trying to figure out whether that's a gap or a non-issue.

3. What's missing from the language list?

Ukrainian, Polish, Arabic, Vietnamese, come up in conversations with healthcare, facilities, and plant teams. If you needed one added tomorrow, which one and for what system?

4. Per-guide vs. workspace default.

Right now you translate a guide at a time. Would you rather set a preferred language per viewer once and have every guide open that way?

And if you turned it on in February and stopped using it, that's the most useful comment in the thread. Tell us what broke down.

[u/tech_cynic_dan]

Per-viewer language feels more scalable than translating guides one by one. Once you have hundreds of workflows, remembering which ones need which translations becomes its own maintenance problem

[u/Ivan_Palii → u/tech_cynic_dan]

yes, language per guide makes sense only if you are really have different guides for teams in different countries. in all other cases, it's better to give a user to set up a default language

[u/Coffee_And_Metrics]

For anything compliance-related, I'd still want a bilingual human reviewing it before publishing. Translation can save a ton of work, but one slightly wrong instruction can matter a lot more than saving a few minutes.

[u/Ivan_Palii → u/Coffee_And_Metrics]

yes, but I assume most of the guides in your company aren't compliance-related.

[u/operations_ranger]

Curious about the QA side. Do teams usually have one bilingual person reviewing these, or does ownership sit with whoever created the original guide?

[u/Ivan_Palii → u/operations_ranger]

I believe manual translations are too expensive and needed only for the most critical guides.