Localisation in Tableau 

If you want to be recognised as a global product then you must be willing to tackle the localisation needs of your target markets.

With Tableau, the localisation of the product lines themselves are thorough and of a high quality, with more languages and locales being added with new releases.

An outstanding issue that has been a thorn in the side of many users is the localisation of their metadata. How can I translate my underlying metadata that Tableau is presenting in an efficient, error-free and reproducible manner?

This is the question that Gravitie Data debated when we were approached by our client who was faced with this challenge directly. As one of the world’s largest reinsurance companies they have a global presence; they trust in the Tableau products to handle the language and locale aspects required for the Tableau environments.

They were looking to begin the task of translating dashboards to multiple languages and had several points to be addressed

• How can they ensure that all of their dashboard titles, legends, filter titles, free-floating text fields and all the other components of a successful visualisation are translated to a desired language consistently and without missing components?

• How can the process be made more automatic, reducing the need for human interaction and therefore reducing the potential for human error?

• Can we check our translations into version control for reuse and maintaining an audit trail?

• How can the process be made easily repeatable and cost effective?

There is an excellent Tableau white paper on Content Localisation which covers the concept of localising data and field labels, as well as discussing the other areas of localisation; it helps to clarify the considerations needed when undertaking a localisation project in a Tableau environment.

The processes in the whitepaper work well for a small number of dashboards/fields but, what happens if you want to take this approach to an enterprise level where there may be dozens of languages and hundreds or thousands of fields to maintain and translate?

An Elegant Solution to a Complex Problem

Tableau Workbooks and Tableau Data Sources provide the user with the ability to alias almost every item that is presented to the end user; from Data Source field names to Graph Axes and even the Dashboard Actions themselves.

Using this as a starting point, we produced an application that extracts the values for all of the fields (labels, aliases, parameters, field names, etc…) contained within a workbook or data source and places them in ISO standard format; XLIFF.

 

XLIFF allows you to decouple the localisation effort from the underlying applications. You perform all your translation within the XLIFF document and then programmatically apply it back to your Workbooks and Data Sources via DooLittle Translates.

The XLIFF document can then be edited within our application or sent to a localisation agency. Once localisation is completed the application will apply the translated fields back to the Workbooks and Data Sources, updating the fields with the new values.

Below is an example of the workflow: