How to automatically publish machine translations for your project

Localize automatically detects new or changed content found in your website or application and brings it into the Pending bin of your Localize dashboard. With our default workflow, machine translations are generated and published only after phrases are manually approved by moving them from the Pending bin to Published bin. However, you may have circumstances where it is preferable to automatically approve and publish machine translations whenever Localize detects new content on your site.

This guide will walk you through the process of setting up Localize to automatically generate and publish machine translations without manually moving phrases from Pending to Published. You’ll also learn how to set up and use the Google Glossary Sync feature.

What you'll learn

• How to enable machine translations
• How to automatically approve phrases to be published
• How to use the Google Glossary Sync feature

Prerequisites

• You have a project set up in Localize

How to enable machine translations

• Follow the instructions here to enable machine translations and select a machine translation vendor.

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Google Glossary Sync

If you’ll be using the Google Glossary Sync feature, you will need to select Google as your machine translation vendor.

How to automatically publish translations

Localize Installation Option

When you installed Localize on your website, you added the Localize code snippet which includes a call to the Localize.initialize() function. To automate the publishing of phrases that are brought into your Localize dashboard, you'll need to set the autoApprove option to true in your call to Localize.initialize().

Localize.initialize({
    key: 'UzF5JaL8NaVDw', 
    rememberLanguage: true,
    autoApprove: true,
    // other options go here, separated by commas
});

This setting tells Localize to automatically publish all new phrases that are found, and automatically generates machine translations for each of your target languages.

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Existing Phrases

If there were any phrases already brought into Localize before you added this option, you can simply select all phrases in the Pending bin and move them to the Published bin. This will generate machine translations for those phrases.

Using the auto-approve Label Action

You can also tell Localize to automatically publish translations by adding the autoapprove or auto-approve attribute to the HTML element that contains the content that you wish to auto-publish. All child elements will skip the Pending bin and go directly into Published and a machine translation will be generated.

Additional tips, recommendations, and resources

Using the Google Glossary Sync feature

If you are using the Google Machine Translation Engine (MTE), you have access to the advanced Google glossary feature. This feature allows you to identify key terminology in your source language and consistently translate that terminology in your target languages using the Google MTE.

As Google translates your content and finds a glossary term in a source phrase it will translate that term with the translation specified in the glossary. This is helpful for content like brand names, product names, and industry-specific terminology.

To enable this feature, follow the instructions here.