How to display translated email message content

This page describes how to show and manage email message content in multiple languages.

The following instructions assume you have created an email campaign and want to display content in different languages, depending on the recipient's language preferences. This information applies to single-send email campaigns, and email messages added to journeys and playbooks.

If you selected in the email Setup to translate your email content to other languages, you will need to use merge tags and Liquid syntax to ensure the message content is conditionally shown to recipients in those languages.

Ways to set language conditions

There are a number of ways you can set language conditions. You can:

• Add in-line conditions to text boxes
• Frame media, such as images, with conditions
• Set conditional formatting for entire rows

In-line text box conditions

In the text boxes, create conditions to determine what content users see, depending on their preferred language. You can combine all language conditions and text content within a text box, such as if you want to write greetings in different languages.

Frame media with conditions

You can frame content with Liquid syntax in text boxes to show different content depending on the language. In the below example, the campaign is setup to translate to Spanish, so using the syntax displayed, English readers will see the top image, but Spanish readers will see the bottom image.

Set conditional formatting for rows

You can also set conditions for an entire row. To do so, click on the row, then in the Rows settings on the right, click Add condition. Enter your name, description, and before and after conditions, then Confirm. The row is now set to display to recipients with the preferred language you specified.



Other handy operators for your conditions are or and contains, such as:

• {% if people.language == 'en-us' or people.language == 'en-gb' %} Display content for all English (US and UK) readers {% elsif people.language == 'es' %} Display content for Spanish readers {% endif %}
• {% if people.language contains 'en' %} Display content for all English (US and UK) readers {% elsif people.language == 'es' %} Display content for Spanish readers {% endif %}

Learn more about using merge tags and Liquid syntax, including the values for each supported language, under Translate campaign content with Liquid in Personalizing campaign content with Liquid.

Supported languages

The values for the languages Ortto currently supports for translation are:

• Chinese (simplified) — zh-cn
• Chinese (traditional) — zh-tw
• Dutch — nl
• English (UK) — en-gb
• English (US) — en-us
• Finnish — fi
• French — fr
• German — de
• Italian — it
• Polish — pl
• Portuguese — pt
• Russian — ru
• Spanish — es
• Ukrainian — uk

What language will a recipient see?

Message content will only be shown to recipients in their preferred language if you use merge tags and Liquid syntax to conditionally show the content in the specified language. Otherwise, if the person has no preferred language set, or their language is not supported in the email, they will see content that is presented in the default language you set under Settings > General > Language > Default. Any text not contained within language conditions will be presented in the language it is written in to all recipients.

Footer links will be presented in the languages the campaign supports. That is, if the campaign is set up to support English (US) and Spanish languages, recipients whose preferred language is Spanish will see the footer links in Spanish, where other recipients will see it in English (US).