Intercom Help Center Translation Best Practices: The 2026 Guide

Your Intercom help center serves customers 24/7. But if it's only in one language, you're leaving international customers without support - forcing them to contact your team instead of self-serving.

Intercom supports multilingual help centers natively. You can add translated versions of articles, and Intercom automatically shows the right language based on customer browser settings. The hard part is creating and maintaining those translations.

This guide covers the best practices for translating your Intercom help center: what to translate first, how to maintain quality, how to keep content in sync, and which workflows actually scale.

Best Practice #1: Start With Your High-Traffic Articles

Don't translate everything at once. Check your Intercom analytics to find articles with the highest views and searches.

How to find high-traffic articles:

Go to Help Center > Reports in Intercom
Look at "Most viewed articles" and "Most searched terms"
Export or note your top 20-30 articles

These high-traffic articles typically handle 80% of customer self-service. Translating them first gives you the biggest impact with the least work.

What to prioritize:

Article Type	Priority	Why
Getting started guides	Critical	New customers need these in their language
Setup & configuration	Critical	Blockers if customers can't understand
Common troubleshooting	High	Reduces support tickets
Feature guides	Medium	Important but not urgent
Advanced topics	Lower	Smaller audience

Start narrow. You can always expand later.

Best Practice #2: Choose the Right Translation Method

There are three main approaches to translating Intercom articles:

Option 1: Manual Translation (Small Scale)

Copy article text into a document. Send to translator. Paste translated text back into Intercom.

Best for: Less than 20 articles, infrequent updates, no ongoing translation needs.

Downsides:

Formatting breaks when copying text out/in
No change tracking - you won't know when source articles update
Time-consuming at scale
Easy to miss articles or create inconsistencies

Option 2: Translation Management Platform (Developer-Heavy Teams)

Tools like Crowdin or Lokalise have Intercom integrations. They pull articles, send them through translation workflows, and push translations back.

Best for: Teams with existing localization workflows, developer resources, 50+ articles.

Downsides:

Requires technical setup and maintenance
Overkill if you only need help center translation
Pricing scales with team size, not article count

Option 3: Dedicated Intercom Translation Tool (Most Teams)

Tools built specifically for Intercom help centers, like TranslateDesk. Direct integration, stale content detection, formatting preservation built in.

Best for: Teams focused on help center translation, minimal technical setup, any article count.

Why this works:

One-click connection to Intercom workspace
AI translation preserves HTML formatting automatically
Automatic change detection flags outdated translations
Built for the specific Intercom workflow

Our recommendation: If help center translation is your main localization need, use a dedicated tool. If you're already using Crowdin/Lokalise for product strings, their Intercom integrations work fine.

Best Practice #3: Preserve Formatting During Translation

Intercom articles aren't plain text. They include:

Headers (H1, H2, H3)
Lists (bulleted and numbered)
Links (internal and external)
Images with alt text
Code blocks and inline code
Callout boxes and dividers
Tables
Videos and embeds

When you translate, this HTML structure needs to survive. Bad translation workflows produce this:

Original: <h2>Getting Started</h2><p>Follow these steps:</p>
Broken:   <h2>Commencer</h2> <p>Suivez ces étapes:</p>  ← Notice the extra spaces

Those extra spaces, broken tags, and structural changes create cleanup work. At scale, this becomes a massive time sink.

How to preserve formatting:

Never copy-paste through Google Docs or Word - they strip HTML
Use tools that process HTML natively - TranslateDesk, Lokalise, Crowdin
Test translations before publishing - check that formatting looks right
Have a QA step for visual review in Intercom's preview

Formatting preservation separates professional translations from amateur ones.

Best Practice #4: Use Glossaries for Consistency

Translation quality drops when the same term gets translated differently across articles.

Example:

Article 1: "workspace" → "espace de travail"
Article 2: "workspace" → "zone de travail"
Article 3: "workspace" → "bureau"

Now customers are confused. Is "espace de travail" the same as "zone de travail"? Your help center sounds inconsistent.

Solution: Build a glossary.

A glossary locks in translations for key terms:

English	French	Spanish	German
workspace	espace de travail	espacio de trabajo	Arbeitsbereich
inbox	boîte de réception	bandeja de entrada	Posteingang
help center	centre d'aide	centro de ayuda	Hilfecenter
ticket	ticket	ticket	Ticket

Glossary best practices:

Start with your product's core vocabulary - the 20-30 terms that appear everywhere
Include brand terms - company name, product names, feature names
Add industry terms - support-specific language your customers expect
Review with native speakers - what sounds natural in that market?

Most translation tools support glossaries. TranslateDesk, Crowdin, and Lokalise all let you upload term lists that the translation engine follows.

Best Practice #5: Track Translation Status

As your article library grows, you need a system to track what's translated and what isn't.

Questions you need to answer:

Which articles exist in which languages?
Which translations are current vs. outdated?
When was each translation last updated?
Which articles are in draft vs. published?

Manual tracking (small teams):

A spreadsheet with columns for article title, source last-updated date, and translation status per language. Works for 50-100 articles. Breaks at scale.

Automated tracking (scaling teams):

Tools with Intercom integration track this automatically:

TranslateDesk shows translation status in a dashboard
Flags when source articles change (so you know what's outdated)
Shows coverage per language (% of articles translated)

The critical feature: change detection.

When you update a source article, you need to know which translations are now stale. Without change detection, translations drift from reality. Customers see outdated information in their language while English is correct.

Best Practice #6: Review Before Publishing

AI translation quality has improved dramatically, but review still matters for customer-facing content.

Why review:

Catches mistranslations of technical terms
Ensures brand voice consistency
Spots formatting issues before they're live
Validates glossary terms are being used

Review workflow options:

Approach	Best For	Time Investment
Quick scan	Low-risk articles, internal docs	2-3 min/article
Full review	Getting started guides, critical docs	10-15 min/article
Native speaker review	High-traffic, customer-facing	External + coordination

Minimum review checklist:

✓ Title and headings make sense
✓ Links work and point to correct translated articles
✓ Product terminology matches glossary
✓ No obvious machine translation artifacts ("click the button to open the window" style)
✓ Formatting looks correct in preview

You don't need perfect translations. You need good enough translations that help customers self-serve. Perfect is the enemy of shipped.

Best Practice #7: Publish Strategically

Intercom gives you control over when translations go live. Use it.

Publishing options:

Publish immediately: For urgent updates or low-risk content
Schedule for review: Translation is ready but needs approval
Draft mode: Translation in progress, not visible to customers

Recommended workflow:

Translate articles in batch (e.g., all Spanish translations this week)
Review all translations before publishing any
Publish as a batch - so customers don't see partial translations
Verify in production that everything displays correctly

Intercom-specific consideration:

When customers switch languages in your help center, they see the translated version of that article. If the translation doesn't exist, they see the default language. This is fine - but be aware that customers can tell when content is missing.

Aim for complete coverage in your supported languages, even if you start with fewer languages.

Best Practice #8: Set Up Change Monitoring

Your help center evolves. Articles get updated, new ones are added, old ones are archived. Your translations need to evolve too.

The problem:

You translate 100 articles into Spanish. Three months later, 40 of those source articles have been updated. Now your Spanish translations are stale - but you don't know which ones.

The solution:

Automatic change monitoring. When a source article updates, the system flags the translation as "needs update."

Tools that do this:

TranslateDesk: Automatic monitoring, dashboard shows outdated translations
Crowdin: Requires setup but supports change detection
Lokalise: Similar, needs configuration

Without tooling:

Manual process - export article last-modified dates, compare against translation dates, flag mismatches. Tedious but possible for small libraries.

Best Practice #9: Measure What Matters

After translation, track whether it's working.

Metrics to watch:

Metric	Why It Matters	Where to Find
Views per language	Are customers using translations?	Intercom Reports
Search terms by language	What are customers looking for?	Intercom Reports
Support tickets by language	Is self-service reducing tickets?	Your ticketing system
Article feedback	Are translations helpful?	Intercom article ratings

Signs translation is working:

Increasing views in translated articles
Decreasing tickets in languages with full coverage
Positive feedback on translated content

Signs something's off:

Translated articles with zero views (customers can't find them)
Same support questions from language groups with coverage
Negative feedback or complaints about translation quality

Use metrics to decide where to invest more: more languages, better translations, or more articles.

Getting Started

If you're ready to translate your Intercom help center:

Audit your current state - how many articles, which languages do you need?
Identify high-traffic articles - start with the top 20-30
Choose your translation method - manual, platform, or dedicated tool
Build your glossary - lock in key term translations
Start translating - begin with one language, learn the workflow
Set up monitoring - don't let translations go stale

TranslateDesk is built specifically for Intercom help center translation. It handles the entire workflow - from importing articles to preserving formatting to monitoring for changes - so you can focus on serving customers in every language.