Problem

Webflow lists about 184 Locales as options, however not all of these actually support machine translation - and [ 09-Dec-2023 ] there is no indication as to which ones Webflow can translate, and which it cannot.

The other 109 in the list are likely to be less common languages on the World scene - and will need to be translated by hand or using some other system with the API.

Unverified

• That this limitation may extend to language variants or dialects, so [ untested! ] if you want to translate a US English site to Australian English, it's likely that Webflow's localization can't help you do that. However to be fair the manner of speak, idioms, phrasing, are likely to be different anyway, and I'm not sure how Amazon Translate would do with that.

Cause

Underlying limitation;

Currently Webflow uses Amazon Translate as the underlying translation engine, which supports these 75 locales only;

Webflow bug;

The fact that most locales in the list do not support machine-translation, and exactly which ones do not, is unclear until after you’ve purchased the locale.

• Webflow presents all 184 locales identically, with no information on which can be machine-translated and which cannot.
• There is zero indication of an unsupported locale ( and no pricing difference ). You do not know until you’ve purchased the locale and it mysteriously cannot be translated.
• There is no obvious messaging, the translation options are just grayed out. You have to hover over the grayed out menu item for awhile for an “unsupported” message to appear.

Workarounds

Before purchasing a locale, verify that it’s supported by Amazon Translate;

As of 25-Dec-2023, supported languages include;

Afrikaans, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Azerbaijani, Bengali, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Chinese (Simplified), Catalan, Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dari, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finnish, French, French (Canada), Georgian, German, Greek, Gujarati, Haitian Creole, Hausa, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Kannada, Kazakh, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Malayalam, Maltese, Mongolian, Marathi, Norwegian, Farsi (Persian), Pashto, Polish, Portuguese, Portuguese (Portugal), Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Sinhala, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Spanish, Spanish (Mexico), Swahili, Swedish, Filipino Tagalog, Tamil, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, and Welsh.

If you encounter this problem, Webflow support recommends checking out the Localise app integration Webflow has, as it appears it may offer some added machine translation support, with designer integration. However as far as I can tell this is not at all "compatible with" Webflow Localization, so you cannot easily have e.g. 2 locales under Webflow Localization, and another 1 through Localise.

If anyone explores this further, let me know.