Connect Contentful with Smartcat

Contentful allows you to create, update, and distribute content for your website, a mobile app, or any other content-displaying medium. When using the integration between Contentful and Smartcat, you can send content from the former to the latter, translate it, and then request that the translation be returned upon completion.

The integration currently supports all Contentful fields enabled for localization, which are all fields with Enable localization checked in Settings.

1. Install the app via this link: https://www.contentful.com/marketplace/app/smartcat/

2. Select Contentful Space and Environment to connect Smartcat to.

2. Click Install and Authorize access on the screens that follow.

3. On the final screen, click Install and Connect to your Smartcat account.

4. Select your Smartcat Workspace.

4. Now everything is ready to configure Smartcat App as a sidebar widget for certain content types that you want to translate via Smartcat. But before that, familiarize yourself with the possible approaches to content localization in Contentful and how to prepare your content models for localization.

1. Go to the Content tab, click Add Entry and add a new entry. Alternatively, you can open an already existing content piece and skip the content creation step. As an example, we'll be creating an entry of Product Description (Multilingual) type.

2. Wait until the Smartcat Translator in the sidebar loads. You will receive a notification that your content model was updated.

3. Reload the page to see the Languages field.

What happened here is that Smartcat detected a missing Languages field, and added it to the content model, populating it with the list of languages in your Contentful Space. You will use this field to determine which languages this particular piece of content needs to be translated to through Smartcat.

Note that the Translation section that is provided by Contentful and shown in the sidebar doesn’t control the list of languages in the object in any way — it just allows you to show or hide some languages in the content editor.

4. Create the content. Add the title for the multilingual content entry, and the content for the product description itself.

5. Go back to the main content object. You will see that the English version references the newly created content of Product Description (Single Language) type.

1. Enable one or more languages for translation. Make sure that your changes were saved (check the Last saved… status under the Publish button in the sidebar).

2. Pick an existing project or choose to create a new one automatically.

3. Choose a translation workflow. You can choose to either translate the content fully automatically (AI translation), automatically with human editing on top of it (AI translation + Human review option) or manually (Human translation).

4. Click Send to Smartcat button in the sidebar.

5. After synchronization is complete, Smartcat App will show links to the project and specific language files.

6. Follow the links displayed in the sidebar to open the project in Smartcat or open individual files directly in the editor for the selected language.

7. When editing is done, go back to Contentful and request the translations by clicking Get translations from Smartcat. Translation progress information will be updated automatically.

Smartcat will notify you when translations have been received.

8. Now you have the translated versions of your object. Smartcat has created a new content of Product Description (Single Language) type and referenced it from the main object:

Click on this object to see its properties. Every field that was marked as localizable now has translations.