KNOWLEDGE BASE · PRODUCT DATA

Eight languages in your catalogue without a translation agency

You do not translate a catalogue once. You keep it up — every night, for every variant that arrives.

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THE VOLUME

Why a translation agency does not fit here

A translation agency is excellent for a text with a beginning and an end: a brochure, a manual, the pages of your site. A catalogue has neither. Our PIM holds 61,693 variants with multilingual copy and 398,678 translation lines in eight languages — nl, en, de, fr, es, it, pl and cz. Every night variants arrive, variants drop out and suppliers change their descriptions.

Send that to an agency and you pay not once but over and over, and you are always behind: by the time the translation comes back, the feed has been past several times. So the problem is not the quality of the translation but the pace at which the source changes. That is not a purchasing question; it is a data question, and it belongs with the source.

THE SOURCE

Where 398,678 translation lines come from

The translation lines come about in three ways, and that distinction matters more than it sounds. What comes out of the feed belongs to the supplier. What the agent adds is proposed and approved by a person. What you write yourself is yours and stays. All three sit in the same source, but they behave differently once the feed comes past the next night.

What the supplier delivers

Each feed brings the copy the supplier has, in the languages it carries. Eight suppliers means eight ways of delivering: one supplies an API per language, the next a single file with everything in it. That copy is written per variant and refreshed on the same night as the prices and the print data.

What the agent adds

An agent works alongside you in the PIM: it fills in missing copy, translates into the languages you need, flags empty fields, proposes categories and spots anomalies in supplier data. The order is fixed: the agent does the work, you approve. It publishes nothing without you, and that is exactly why it is usable at this scale.

What you set yourself

A feed rarely delivers the tone you want to sell in. Your own copy, your own category names and your own product names are set in the PIM, and what you set stays put when the supplier changes his description. That way you keep the benefits of a continuous connection without taking your supplier's catalogue over unchanged.

A DIFFERENCE THAT IS NOT A FAULT

Eight languages in the PIM, three in the CMS

Here is a distinction that is often mistaken for a fault. The PIM carries eight languages: those are the languages of your items, your variants and your print data. The CMS carries three — Dutch, German and English — and those are the languages of your pages, your company details and your frequently asked questions. Two different kinds of text, two different sources, two different coverages.

That is a choice and not an omission. Product copy has to be right in every market you sell in, because an order depends on it. Your pages do not have that volume and rarely change, so somebody writes those in the languages they command. If a supplier promises you eight full languages while the source carries three, ask further — because what is missing only shows when a customer trips over it.

THE GAPS

What happens when a language is missing

A missing language is not an exception but the normal state of affairs. Not every supplier carries every language, and some deliver a language on paper but not in practice. So the question is not whether there are gaps, but what your sales environment does when it meets one. With us it falls back neatly to English instead of showing an empty field — an English description can be understood, an empty product page cannot.

Two of our eight feeds show how such a gap arises, and we would rather name both up front. What also applies: we can only pass on what a supplier delivers. If a field is missing from the feed, it is missing from our source too, and we do not fill it in with something that looks about right.

XD Connects always returns the same language

The feed URL returns the same language regardless of which language you request. A multilingual catalogue therefore needs separate feeds per language; until those exist, this part of the range falls back to English. It concerns 6,469 items, so it is not a detail you want to discover afterwards.

At Toppoint the translation link is stalled

The link is stuck on a missing key. This supplier's items, prices and images do come through; the translation lines lag behind until that key is there. We would rather say that now than at handover.

WHAT IT ASKS OF YOU

Approving stays human work

Eight languages without a translation agency does not mean eight languages without attention. The agent does the work and you approve, and approving is not a formality: a wrong product name in one language costs you findability and part of your sales in that market. What we recommend is to appoint one person per market to sample-check the copy in their own language, rather than having one person read everything.

If you want to know how your own catalogue is doing, count it: how many variants, how many languages, how many fields are empty, and per supplier what does and does not come through. That count tells you what to expect — and that order, count first and promise afterwards, is one we hold ourselves to as well.

READ ON

What this is about

The translation lines in this piece sit in the PIM/DAM module; the connected suppliers page shows per feed what comes through and what does not. The copy of your own pages is managed in the CMS module.

How many languages are really in your catalogue?

Send us an export or one supplier feed. You get back how many variants are multilingual, which fields stay empty and which supplier does or does not deliver which language.

Rather see how that works out in a sales environment? Book a demo in your own branding.

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