How to Create a Duplicate ( linked ) table that only includes some Records

Jim_DiGiovanni · ‎Aug 20, 2020

I am very much a novice, so please forgive me if this is an obvious question. I am not even sure if I am asking the question in the right way.

I have a product database that contains thousands of listings and about 50 columns of data per listing.

Visualize that these products fall into a variety of different ‘brand names’ that are specified in a column.

I want to use the Translate Block to translate some of my product descriptions into several different languages, but I don’t want to translate all of them.

It seems like I would create a duplicate of my main base and somehow just include the brands that I want to translate into that base and then add the translate block to that base. Is that correct?

The reasoning behind this is because the Google Translate API charges for translation based on character count and it could get very pricey for me to translate a lot of products to multiple languages if I do not need to.

Any advice on how I should approach this and what the process might be?

Thanks in advance.

JIM D.

Justin_Barrett · ‎Aug 20, 2020

Welcome to the community, @Jim_DiGiovanni! :grinning_face_with_big_eyes: There’s no need to copy any data to a new base. You can do it all directly in your current base with very few changes.

What you need to do is learn about Airtable’s views. Views are a way of controlling how you look at your data. A single table can have multiple views, with each view using a unique combination of filters, groups, sorting, etc. to let you see the same table data in different ways.

Views are also used by many of Airtable’s blocks, including the Translate block. When using the Translate block, you’ll pick both a table and view that the block should operate on, and it will only operate on that view until you tell it otherwise.

With this in mind, you can create a view that only includes the records that you want to translate (more about Airtable’s filter features can be seen using the link below), and then target that view from the Translate block. Need to add more records? Modify their properties so that they are picked up by the view filters.