How translations work when importing a Help Center

When you import a Help Center from HubSpot, Intercom, or Zendesk, HappySupport queues translations for your imported articles as part of the import. You don't have to start them yourself. Each article gets translated into the other languages configured for your Help Center.

What it's for

If you're moving a multilingual Help Center into HappySupport, you want readers to see translated versions of your articles. You don't want every translation imported as its own separate article. Automatic translation during import handles this: your imported articles act as the source, and the translated versions are generated from them.

Key terms

• Source language: the language your Help Center's original articles are written in.
• Translation language: a target language enabled for your Help Center. You manage these under "Translation languages" in the Help Center's translation settings.
• Translation job: background work that produces one version of one article in one target language.

Each imported article is the source for its translation jobs. An article's own source language is never queued as a translation target.

When translations are queued

Translations are queued near the end of the import. First, the import rewrites internal article links and processes external images. Then the translation jobs are queued, and after that the import is marked as complete.

This order matters: your translations are based on the imported content after links and images have been handled. So translated articles get the same updated links and images as the source.

The Help Center's translation languages are read at the moment the jobs are queued. If you change your translation languages while the import is still running, those changes are taken into account.

Which languages and articles are included

For each imported article, HappySupport creates one translation job for every configured translation language except that article's source language. Say your Help Center is set up with German and French as translation languages. Each imported English article then gets one German job and one French job.

A few other rules apply:

• If no translation languages are configured, no translation jobs are created.
• Articles with a recorded import failure aren't queued for translation.
• If a job already exists for the same article and target language, it's refreshed as a full retranslation.

Every job runs independently, per article and per language. A finished job is recorded as finished. A job that runs into an error records that error on the job itself, and this doesn't turn the import into a failure.

What you see during and after the import

The import status appears in a banner on the Help Center overview. It shows phases like "Linking related articles," "Processing images," and "Import complete," with counts or a progress bar where available. Translation queuing doesn't appear as a separate phase in this banner.

Translation progress shows up on the Help Center's translation settings page. Each configured language shows an "in progress" count while work is running, and the page shows a running summary like "Translating 12 articles into German and French."

"Import complete" confirms that the import finished. It doesn't guarantee that every translation job was queued or succeeded. If queuing fails, the import still completes, and translations may need to be retried separately. Changing your translation languages is the documented way to retry missing translations, because adding a language triggers translation of existing articles. Adding a new unique translation language may count toward your organization's plan limit.

For more on managing translation languages, see "How to translate your Help Center." For the import itself, see "How to import an existing Help Center."