Best way to handle multilingual product data & generate versioned “Article Passes”?

Hey ​@Philipp_E,

I don’t think I’m following what the issue is. Would you mind sharing some more detail? I do undertand your structure, but I do not understand what issue you are facing with it. Under which table are you rolling up this data? 

Thanks!!

Completely different matter, but would love to have you join our Airtable Hackathon! Make sure to sign up!!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel

Hey Mike,

absolutely, thanks for offering your help! Basically, I would like to generate an output in the mentioned structure so that I can pass on a document to design department and they can insert the information into the packaging design. 

For example: I need to provide design department with all the necessary input for a cat treat. The input consists in the ingredients, analytical constituents, description and so forth in ten languages. This data may vary depending on improving the product, so I need different versions. The data is stored in my tables and my aim is to generate a text document for a specific version in certain languages ready to be used by the design department. I’m completely new to Airtable and have worked my way up but am not sure whether I completely understand whether it’s is the right tool for my needs. 
 

Does this help to understand me better?

Thanks in advance and best regards

Philipp

Hi ​@Philipp_E,

I’m not sure if I’m completely understanding, but it sounds like you want to do automatic translations of big blocks of text?

You might be able to do automatic translations with Airtable’s built-in AI functions, but there is a much more efficient way of doing it:

I have a few clients doing automatic translations in their Airtable bases by using Make’s DeepL integrations along with Make’s Airtable integrations.

You can also use Make’s Google Translate integrations, but we have found that DeepL offers more accurate translations.

If you’ve never used Make before, I’ve assembled a bunch of Make training resources in this thread. For example, here is one of the ways that you could instantly trigger a Make automation from Airtable. 

Hope this helps! If you’d like to hire the best Airtable consultant to help you with anything Airtable-related, please feel free to contact me through my website: Airtable consultant — ScottWorld

Got it, so as mentioned by ​@ScottWorld it seems that you need to actually handle the translations?

If so, the leanest approach would be to levearege Airtable’s native AI features. Otherwise, if you need something more robust you can def use Make, n8n or any other automation tool to (a) use a different AI model not offerend by Airtable, or (b) just use an API that actually handles translations for you.

Completely different matter, but would love to have you join our Airtable Hackathon! Make sure to sign up!!

Mike, Consultant @ Automatic Nation 
YouTube Channel

smarter or more dynamic multilingual output – the formula solution is not very handy

Hm, could you provide some screenshots of how this works and talk a bit more about the difficulties the formula solution is giving you?

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only displaying languages with existing content   

It sounds like you’ve got one rollup field per language in the Versions table, and that big formula combines all of them together?  In my head we’d use “IF”s to chain and only display the rollups where there’s text, but I take it that isn’t working for you?  Could you provide some screenshots of the set up for this bit?

IF(
  {English Rollup}, 
  {English Rollup} & '\n'
) & 
IF(
  {German Rollup}, 
  {German Rollup} & '\n'
) 

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best export options (plain text or doc templates)

Hm, it feels like this really depends on your business logic.  If plain text works for your design department then it’d be simplest?  

You could potentially create templated PDFs via third party tools like DocsAutomator or something where you create the template and feed the Airtable data in

You can also use formulas to crewate some pretty involved HTML too if that helps

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overall thoughts on my relational setup

Seems fine, but if you could talk more about how each table works with each other and provide some example screenshots that’d be really helpful.  My idea of how you’ve got this set up may be completely different from what you’ve actually done, you know what I mean?

I also do free half hour calls and would be happy to run through your setup with you if you’d like, and you can grab a time here!