What to know before you buy
Multilingual Pages keeps every translation of a piece of content on a single Confluence page. Each reader sees their language, without leaving the page or changing address.
That choice is what makes the product worth having — one page to create, file, share and maintain. It also has direct consequences, set out below. None of them is a temporary defect: they are the price of the principle, and it is better to know them before choosing.
1. What every language shares
A page is still one Confluence page. Everything Confluence attaches to a page is therefore shared by all its translations:
| Item | What it means in practice |
|---|---|
| The title | It exists in one language only, the same for everyone |
| The address (URL) | A single link whatever the reader's language — the product's main benefit, and this is its price |
| Comments | A comment written in French is visible to a German reader |
| Version history | Editing only the Spanish text appears in the whole page's history |
| Notifications | Any change notifies everyone watching the page, whichever language was touched |
| Permissions | You cannot grant access to one language and not another |
| Position in the tree | One position, one parent |
If any of these is a deal-breaker — if your translations need distinct access rights, or translated titles — this product does not fit your need, and it is better to know now. A "one page per language" approach remains preferable then, with the maintenance that comes with it.
The title: practical advice
Two approaches work well: write it in the team's main language, or give it a short form everyone recognises — a product code, a proper noun, a reference.
2. Search finds words from every language
Confluence indexes the whole page, so every term of every translation.
What you will see: a colleague searching for a German word may land on a page they will then read in French, because that is their language.
This is not a fault — the page does contain that German word. But a search result can lead to a page whose displayed content does not visibly contain the term.
3. How many languages per page
There is no technical limit. In practice, display time grows with the number of languages on a page, and it becomes noticeable to readers beyond a few.
The app warns you when a page goes past three languages. The warning blocks nothing and signals no error: it is a marker.
Our recommendation: up to three or four languages per page, the experience stays fluid. Beyond that, expect a longer display time, and ask yourself whether all those languages truly belong on the same page.
Very long pages, with many languages or nested blocks, are also harder to edit — true of any dense Confluence page, amplified here by the number of translations.
4. Empty space where hidden languages are
What you will see: in view mode, empty space above and below the displayed text. It corresponds to the hidden translations, and it grows with the number of languages on the page.
The other languages' content is not visible — there is no text leaking from one language to another. Only the space remains.
That space is produced by Confluence itself, around the area where the app renders, and no app setting can remove it. Exported documents carry no trace of it.
5. How the displayed language is chosen
In order: the language the reader chose on this page, then their Atlassian profile language, then the language marked as the page default, then the first language on the page.
A reader switches via Select language, under the page title. Their choice is remembered.
That choice applies to this page only
Choosing English on one page has no effect on any other.
This is deliberate: one rarely switches language out of preference — the Atlassian profile language already covers that — but much more often because one's language is not available on that particular page. Extending such a circumstantial choice to a whole space would push pages that did offer the right language into a language the reader did not want.
The right setting for a reader is their Atlassian profile language: it applies everywhere, with nothing to do. The switcher is for the exceptions.
Serbian
The Atlassian profile does not distinguish Latin from Cyrillic Serbian. If a page offers both, automatic selection cannot tell which to use, and the reader must pick. Every other language is recognised without intervention.
6. Exports and printing
PDF, Word and printing export one language only: the one the person exporting was seeing on screen, following the rules in section 5.
Two people exporting the same page in different languages therefore get two different documents — which is the expected behaviour.
Exported documents carry no flag and no language label. With a single language in them, there is no ambiguity.
7. Accessibility
Reading a page and switching language are fully keyboard-operable: reaching the switcher under the title, browsing the languages, choosing one. Light and dark themes are supported, and contrast meets WCAG AA. The current language is marked by text, not by colour alone.
Configuring a language macro in the editor needs more than the keyboard. A macro's edit button, in the Confluence editor, cannot take keyboard focus. That limit belongs to the Confluence editor and affects every app of this kind; we cannot fix it. Creating a multilingual page therefore requires a mouse.
Behaviour with a screen reader has not been tested: we claim no conformance on that point.
8. If the app is uninstalled
No content is lost. Your translations stay in your Confluence pages; they belong to you and are stored nowhere else.
What you will see in view mode: in place of each translation, a Confluence error message saying the extension cannot load. Language selection stops working.
How to recover your content: open the page in edit mode. All the text is there and can be copied wherever you want.
We recommend exporting or copying your content before a permanent uninstall, while the app still works.
9. What we do not promise
On principle, we would rather claim nothing we have not verified:
- Jira Service Management portals have not been tested; we announce no compatibility;
- screen readers have not been tested (see section 7);
- some content placed inside a translation has had no formal testing: tables, images, attachments, code blocks, mentions, other vendors' macros, right-to-left scripts, and very large content. Formatted text, headings and lists work; the rest displays correctly in ordinary use, but we have not exercised it enough to write it down as a guarantee.
If any of these is decisive for you, write to us before buying: we would rather check it with you than let you find out.