Managing Language Profiles | Yext Hitchhikers Platform

What You’ll Learn

In this section, you will learn:

• How to create, update and delete language profiles
• How to set a language as the primary language
• Benefits of profile language consistency across your entities

Overview

Before you can start adding your multi-language content, you need to create the profiles on your entities. You can do this straight from Entity Edit from the “Languages” module which functions largely as the “control center” for your language profiles.

You will see the Languages module on your entity (given you have the right permissions) when you are in single edit or bulk edit. You can add, remove or change the profiles in either mode and it will impact all of the entities that you have selected.

Managing Language Profiles

From the Language module on Entity Edit, you can:

• Add new profiles by clicking the +Add Language link. You’ll then see a modal where you can search for and select the language profile you want to add to that entity or set of entities. Remember that you want your entities to share the same language profiles in order to be included in the same Search or Pages experience.

• View other language profiles by clicking on the language. This will take you to the rendered view of the profile (basically combining the content from the primary profile and data specifically on that profile to give you a completed view of the entity).

• Remove language profiles by clicking on the “…” that appear when you hover on a language profile. This will delete the profile and all of its content so please do this carefully. If you mistakenly added “en_ca” instead of “en” you should change profile language instead of deleting the language and creating a new one to preserve any content that you added.

• Change language profiles to other languages. This allows you to change the language associated with the profile, while keeping any content you added on the profiles. This should only be done to switch the language between the country variants, e.g., “en” to “en_ca” or “en_gb” or vice versa. It should not be used to change profiles from “fr” to “de” – assuming that the content on the profile is already written out in French.

• Set primary profile. You can change which language is the primary profile language. This has implications in terms of defaults sent to endpoints like Listings. For any overridable fields, if you have overwritten the content on the alternate profile before making it the primary profile, it will use that content for all other profiles after you switch. For example, let’s say you have a location for the brand Staples with 3 profiles:

  • English (en) - primary
  • French Canadian (fr_ca) - alternate
  • Spanish (es) - alternate

  On the fr_ca profile, you’ve overwritten the business name to reflect the brand’s name to “Bureau en Gros” as it’s known in French, but you’ve kept “Staples” as the name on the Spanish profile. If you switch the primary profile to fr_ca, the Spanish profile will now have “Bureau en Gros” as the default business name instead of “Staples”, which is what you want it to have. You’ll need to make sure you make these changes carefully so that you can put the right overrides in place.

Here’s a quick video of what it looks like to add an alternate language profile, view that profile and see the different field behaviors.

Managing Entity Profiles via Entity Upload

In the upload, you can:

• Create additional profiles for existing entities by including a “Language Profile” column in your upload with the language code (pro-tip: don’t include the country field as this is not changeable for existing entities)

• Add a new entity with a specific primary language profile (if not specified, we will use the default based on your account country - you can find your account’s default language in Account Settings)

• Update content for any existing language profile if the upload contains both the Entity ID and the language code (more on this in the next unit)

In the upload, you cannot:

• Delete language profiles
• Change the primary profile
• Create additional profiles for new entities in the same upload. You can only create new profiles for existing entities.

Managing Entity Profiles via API

You can fully manage entity profiles (create, read, update and delete) via our API. You can read more about that in our API Documentation .

Profile Language Consistency

The most important thing to keep in mind when you’re creating language profiles is that for each search instance or page set, you need a consistent set of language codes across entities. In other words, if you want a single English experience, you’ll need all profiles to be the same variation of English language profile – whether that’s “en” or “en_gb” (or another english variant). If your profiles are mixed between “en” and “en_gb” that is actually going to result in two separate search instances or pages sets, one hosted on /en/ and another on /en_gb/.

For example, if your entity profiles are spread out across different english variants like in the image below, you won’t be able to search all of those profiles in one search experience (you’d have separate ones per locale):

Instead, if you want just one English experience, it should look like this:

That said, it is totally fine to have a “jagged language profile structure”. By this we mean that not all entities in your account must share the same exact profile languages. You can have some FAQs that have English, Spanish and French profiles and other FAQs that just have Spanish profiles. The consistency only matters to the extent that they are the same type of Spanish profiles. A jagged language profile structure will merely result in a different number of pages or results cards in each language.