Marketing Localization

Overview of GitLab’s marketing localization proccesses and infrastructure that enmable about.gitlab.com to be available in multiple languages.

Marketing Localization

Our website is now available in 6 languages. The translated content of our website pages is stored across the about-gitlab-com project. For further technical details on localizing marketing content, go to the Digital Experience’s Localization best practices team Handbook page

List of localized websites

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
Italian https://about.gitlab.com/it-it/ Live
Brazilian Portuguese https://about.gitlab.com/pt-br/ Live
Spanish https://about.gitlab.com/es/ Live

International Blogs

GitLab’s blog is available in Japanese, French and German, with a dedicated content manager:

Language URL Content Manager
JA https://about.gitlab.com/ja-jp/blog/ Megumi Uchikawa
FR https://about.gitlab.com/fr-fr/blog/ Maud Leuenberger
DE https://about.gitlab.com/de-de/blog/ Hendrik Breuer

Translating content for campaigns

The Integrated Marketing team typically drives which translations are required, based on current campaigns and regional need. Localized campaigns currently follow the integrated campaign process. The Integrated Marketing team is responsible for content localization for integrated campaigns.

Language preference segmentation

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.

Translated URL structure

All translated pages live in a sub-folder dedicated to a specific language. These sub-folders use ISO 639-1 codes.

hreflang tagging

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="https://en-gb.example.com/page.html" />
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en-us"
       href="https://en-us.example.com/page.html" />
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="en"
       href="https://en.example.com/page.html" />
  <link rel="alternate" hreflang="de"
       href="https://de.example.com/page.html" />
 <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x-default"
       href="https://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 penalties across Google properties.

Aleyda Solis maintains a great tool to build hreflang tags we can use for reference as well.