This page contains guidelines for localization at GitLab. This page is currently maintained by the Marketing Operations team.
GitLab is a global company that does business around the world. In order to best serve our global customers, we localize some of our content and campaigns into native languages.
Our current localization capablities are limited due to resources and bandwidth. Currently, we are focused on translating content that aligns to our Tier 1 and some Tier 2 countries. The Integrated Marketing team typically drives which translations are required, based on current campaigns and regional need. We use Smartling for translation, and to date, most translations have focused on eBooks, landing pages, emails, digital marketing advertisements, and partner marketing materials.
To ensure translated content makes contextual and technical sense, we have internal native language speakers review the content. At the moment, our internal reviewers are volunteers. We completely appreciate that this task is on top of your day job and will continue to respect that. Both translation and reviews are conducted in Smartling, and detailed instructions for internal review can be found on the Smartling page.
Annually we prioritize countries that we believe offer the most opportunity for GitLab. A listing of those countries and our expected level of investment are tracked in an internal document called: Globalization Tracker.
| Vendor | Capabilities | How to Access |
|---|---|---|
| Smartling | Localization platform | Instructions for access |
Localized campaigns currently follow the integrated campaign process. The Integrated Marketing team is responsible for content localization for integrated campaigns.
In order to offer content and events in preferred languages where available, we have a Language Preference Segmentation created in Marketo. Only Marketing Ops can edit these segments. Available languages for this segmentation can be found on the Marketo page. A person will be added to a Language Preference segment if they complete a form on our website or respond to a campaign that was offered in one of the available languages.
Note: In FY23Q3 we began the transition to Smartling as our localization vendor. The following sections refer to our existing implementation in the www-gitlab-com repository specifically, which will be replaced by the Smartling implementation in our Buyer Experience repository. The transition to Smartling can be tracked here.
All translated pages live in a sub-folder dedicated to a specific language. These sub-folders use ISO 639-1 codes. For example, German pages live in the /de/ sub-folder.
Search engines use the hreflang tag to determine a canonical version for translated pages. We'll use hreflang on our translated pages.
hreflang tags start with declaration <link rel="alternate", adds URL href={{url}}, and ends with hreflang={{language ISO}}
Example of a hreflang tag for a URL translated to German.
<link rel="alternate" href="https://about.gitlab.com/de-de/warum/nutze-continuous-integration-fuer-schnelleres-bauen-und-testen/" hreflang="de" />
The canonical version of our site will the United States English version on about.gitlab.com. We need to add all versions of a page under the page title and link to each one with the appropriate language noted. Google provides this example:
<head>
<title>Widgets, Inc</title>
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-gb"
href="http://en-gb.example.com/page.html" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us"
href="http://en-us.example.com/page.html" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="en"
href="http://en.example.com/page.html" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="de"
href="http://de.example.com/page.html" />
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default"
href="http://www.example.com/" />
</head>
It's important to note we need to declare the default page from our repository as the canonical version to avoid penalities across Google properties.
Aleyda Solis maintains a great tool to build hreflang tags we can use for reference as well.
| Language | Localized Landing Page | Status |
|---|---|---|
| French | https://about.gitlab.com/fr-fr/ | Live |
| Japanese | https://about.gitlab.com/ja-jp/ | Live |
| German | https://about.gitlab.com/de-de/ | Live |