Translations & regional markets

StaticOwl can serve one site in several regions and languages from a single set of content. You keep writing in your main language; for each region that needs a different language, you add translations on top. Readers get the right version at a clean regional URL, and you can see at a glance what still needs translating.

Two ideas do the work, and they are independent:

Markets are the regions you publish to — for example a default market plus gb, in, de, ae. Each non-default market lives under its own URL prefix (/de/…); the default market stays at the root.
Languages are what a market reads in. A market can share your default language (a regional variant in the same language) or use a different one. A market whose language differs from the default is a localized market — those are the ones that need translations.

Because the two are separate, gb and in can stay in your default language while de reads in German, without duplicating a single page.

The Translations workspace

Open Translations in the admin. It has three tabs:

Coverage — a board with one column per localized market and one row per page. Each cell shows the page's state in that market: translated, stale (the source changed after the translation, so it needs another pass), not started, or not applicable. A filter narrows the board to just what is untranslated or stale, so a long site stays manageable.
Interface text — the wording that is not page content: navigation, footer, buttons, and other chrome. You translate these once per language in a catalog, and every page in that language picks them up.
Markets — where you add or remove a market and set its language and text direction. Right-to-left languages render with the correct direction automatically.

Click any cell on the Coverage board to open a side-by-side editor: your source text on one side, the translation on the other, field by field (title, description, body). You edit the translation directly and save it as a draft.

Translating a page

A translation is an overlay on the original. You only translate the fields that should differ; anything you leave blank falls back to the source, so a partly translated page still works.

In the admin: open a page from the Coverage board, pick the market, and fill in the translated fields in the side-by-side editor.
With your AI assistant: ask it to translate a page into a market's language. It reads the source fields and writes the translation back as a draft for you to review.

Draft with AI

In the side-by-side editor, Draft with AI fills the translation from your source text. It translates field by field and keeps your HTML and formatting intact. Short pages come back right away; long pages run as a background job you can check on, so a large page never times out.

As with every AI feature in StaticOwl, nothing publishes on its own — a drafted translation lands for you to read, edit, and approve. See AI features for how AI changes flow through review.

How translated pages are published

Translations follow the same path as the rest of your content: draft, review, then publish with a build. A build renders each market under its own URL prefix and sets the correct language and text direction on every page, so search engines and screen readers see a proper regional, localized page rather than a copy of the default one. See Publishing & environments and Routing for the URL and build details.

If a site should not use markets at all, leave it with a single default market and the workspace stays out of your way.

Driving it from an AI assistant

The translation and markets tools ship in the MCP server as the markets toolset (regional markets, language catalogs, and AI translation). Select it when you connect — see Connect your AI assistant — then ask in plain language, for example:

"List the markets on this site and show translation coverage."
"Add a German market and translate the homepage and pricing page into it."
"Which pages are stale in the de market? Re-draft them and leave them for review."

The assistant uses the same drafts-and-review flow as the admin, so you stay in control of what goes live.