Concept: Language Instances for Translated Templates

You can design and customize content for multiple languages in a single Docs template. When you create a template, Docs assigns a base language of English; the base language is like a foundation language on which any new language instance is based. When you add a new language instance, Docs automatically copies the content of the base language into the new language instance, then you can customize the new instance for that language.

You can define the languages that are available to add in the

Languages

section on the

Edit Tenant Setup – Global

task. Note that Docs doesn't support right-to-left (RTL) languge formatting.

To add a language instance, select

Language

Add Language

.

From the

Add Language

dialog you can also change the base language of a template. After you change the base language, any new language instance that you create will copy the new base language content; existing template language instances retain the same content.

You customize each language instance by manually replacing the original content with translated content for that language. If you want styling, layouts, data fields, or condition rules to apply across all language instances, you need to set those up in the base language before creating the language instances.

To delete a language instance, select it in the Languages dialog and click the X icon. You can't delete a language if it's assigned as the base; select another language as the base first.

When you publish a Docs template, all of the language instances are published too.

If you don’t add an instance for a document recipient’s language in the Docs template, the generated document will be sent using the base language.

The way you manage languages for generated documents that are based on Docs templates in Drive remains the same as for traditional text block based documents:

Data field and condition rule formatting in generated documents will continue to be based on the recipient user's location, not the language instance of the template.