Intercom Articles

Learn how to translate your Intercom articles into multiple languages

Ilya Krukowski avatar
Written by Ilya Krukowski
Updated over a week ago

This feature is available from the Pro plan and above.

Intercom Articles app allows you to import articles and collections from Intercom to your Lokalise project and translate the content with ease. After the translations are ready, you can export them back to Intercom with just a couple of clicks.

Known limitations

Intercom API has certain limitations related to what information can be imported and exported. Specifically, when importing images from Intercom their widths and heights are stripped out: in fact, only the image source is preserved. It means that if you manually resize an image in an Intercom article, then import this article to Lokalise, translate it, and export back, the custom image sizes will be lost due to this limitation.

Getting started

Let's see how to set up the Intercom Articles app and choose data to translate.

Necessary permissions

In order to set app properly, you will need the following Intercom access rights:

  • Install, configure, and delete apps.

  • Manage articles.

Connecting Lokalise to Intercom

To get started, open your Lokalise project and proceed to Apps:

Find Intercom Articles in the list, click on it and then press Install. Then click Install to integrate Intercom with Lokalise:

Review the requested permissions and click Authorize access.

Importing from Intercom

This app also supports automated import. You can learn more in the corresponding article.

After setting up the app, you will see a list of your articles and collections available on Intercom. To be able to translate these items, you will need to import them. Therefore, choose one or more items by ticking the checkboxes next to the titles and then click Import selected:

All languages that are not present in your Lokalise project but are available on Intercom will be created automatically.

After clicking Import selected, decide which languages to import and whether the already downloaded items should be updated with the values from Intercom:

  • Overwrite updated translations — update already existing keys that were linked to items on Intercom with new values.

  • Skip key creation for empty translations — when checked, Lokalise will not create a translation key for translation items that are empty on Intercom.

  • Assign tags — choose tags that would like to assign to translation keys.

Click OK to start the import. This process will be run in the background, and you can check its status on the Activity page.

Filter the items using the Filter dropdown:

Note on character limits

Please note that we do respect character limits set on Intercom. However, if you change the character limit in Lokalise after importing from Intercom, you can still export a draft back into Intercom but you won’t be able to publish it in Intercom without reducing the number of characters to meet the character limit set in Intercom.

Adding new Intercom Articles languages

In order to add more languages to Intercom, you should proceed to Articles > Help Center > Settings > Localize your Help Center. Then click Add language and choose one of the options from the dropdown.

Please note that if you have added a new language to Intercom but have not created at least one article, collection, or a section in this language, Lokalise will not be able to synchronize this language properly due to Intercom limitations. In other words, Lokalise will not be able to detect if you've added a new language to Intercom Articles. To notify Lokalise about this new language, you have to add it to at least one article/section/collection before performing the importing process. For example, if you have recently added Japanese, you'll need to add it to any article in the following way:

Working with the translation keys

After the chosen items are imported, you can proceed to the project editor. Translation keys containing the imported items will be assigned with the following tags:

  • Intercom Articles — assigned to all items imported by Intercom Articles app.

  • Article — assigned to the keys that represent articles.

  • title — assigned to the keys that contain article titles.

  • description — assigned to the keys containing article or collection descriptions.

  • body — assigned to the keys containing article bodies (main text).

  • Collection — assigned to the keys that represent collections.

  • Section — assigned to the keys that represent sections.

  • name — assigned to the keys containing collection or section names.

  • Additionally, every key has a tag containing the item name (for collections) or title (for articles). For example, if some key contains the body of an article named "Hello", then this key will be assigned a Hello tag.

Please note that Intercom has length limitations for certain items (article titles, collection names etc). Therefore when performing translations you will see the maximum allowed length:

Exporting to Intercom

This app also supports automated export. You can learn more in the corresponding article.

After you have finished translating your content, it's time to export new strings back to Intercom! To achieve that, proceed to More > Apps > Intercom Articles and choose one or more items that you would like to export:

After choosing the items, press Export selected. Choose what languages you would like to export.

If needed, you can Convert the exported Articles to drafts. Once you are ready, press OK. The chosen items will be uploaded to Intercom!

Please note that empty translations will be ignored and won't be exported to Intercom!

Importing updated content from Intercom

You may import updated content from Intercom to Lokalise for the items that were already downloaded. To achieve that, proceed to Apps > Intercom Articles and choose one or more items that you would like to import from Intercom. Next, click Import selected.

Did this answer your question?