Understand Contentful app and its supported content types

There are two basic approaches to localizing content in Contentful:

1. Localizing object fields directly

2. Creating a localizable field that references different instances of other content

The diagrams below show these two approaches:

• Green fields represent localizable fields (you can mark any field in Contentful as localizable). Localizable fields can have multiple locale variants.

• Black fields represent non-localizable fields.

• Red fields represent special non-localizable fields that the Smartcat app will create automatically and will use to determine the list of languages into which you would like to translate the object.

Use this approach if you want to translate individual objects and keep language variants for every field that you will explicitly mark as localizable. This will work well if you don’t keep nested content models.

In most cases, you will want to have your content structured in a tree-like fashion and have your content reference other content types. In this mode, you can keep complex content as it is, without marking every single field as localizable, and instead localize the entire tree of properties by referencing them from a single “umbrella” content entry, which references each language-specific instance.

Let’s add a new content model and configure it for localization with Smartcat. We will be using the complex object model (see above).

We will create two object types:

1. Individual product content model — objects of this type will contain actual localizable content. Please note that you don’t need to mark every single field in this content model as localizable — Smartcat will take care of it automatically.

2. Multilingual reference content model — this content type will be used as an “umbrella” object to reference actual product descriptions.

Go to the Content Model tab and create a new Content Model with the following fields:

The Name field will be used as Entry title.

Go to the Content Model tab and create a new Content Model with the following fields:

1. Title → field of Short text type. Click Create and configure and enable the This field represents the Entry title option. You don’t need to localize the title itself — this object will just reference all localized copies, so its title is needed for management purposes only.

2. Product description → Reference to a single entry (One reference). Click Create and configure and tick the Enable localization of this field option:

3. Go to the Sidebar tab and move Smartcat Translator from the left column to the right one, then click Save. This will enable localization of that particular content model.

Now you can start sending the content to Smartcat for translation. Read here how to use the Contentful integration.