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Multilingual support when using GTM

Cookiebot support
  • Updated

In Google Tag Manager (GTM), the language of the Cookiebot consent banner can be controlled by a GTM variable. This allows you to automatically detect which language your banner should be displayed in.

We assume that you've already implemented the Cookiebot CMP tag in GTM.

While this can be achieved in multiple ways (you may for example create a Custom JavaScript Variable named "Current Language" that returns a two-letter ISO language code based on custom logic), in this example the language is determined by a sub-directory. For example: domain.com/xx/, domain.com/xx-xx/, or domain.com/xx_xx/ 
If no match is found for such a sub-directory, a sub-domain will be used instead. For example: xx.domain.com.
If neither of these gave us a language code, the domain extension will be used. For example: domain.xx
If no language sub domain/directory is available and the the domain extension is more than 3 characters long (i.e. com, net, or info), your default language will be applied.

The script also takes into account cases where the country and language ISO codes don't match, as is the case for example for Estonia (EE) : Estonian (ET).

Implementation

  1. Create a new Custom JavaScript Page Variable
  2. Assign the new variable a name, for example: Current Language
  3. Add the following code to the text field:
function () {
  var d = "en", //Set your default language here
      l = {au:"en",ca:"en",cz:"cs",dk:"da",ee:"et",no:"nb",se:"sv",uk:"en"},
      h = window.location.hostname.toLowerCase(),
      p = window.location.pathname.toLowerCase(),
      r = [
        /^\/([a-z]{2})([_-][a-z]{2})?(\/.*)?$/g.exec(p),
        /^([a-z]{2})\./.exec(h),
        /\.([a-z]{2,})$/.exec(h)
      ],
      c = "";
  for (var i = 0; i < r.length; i++) { 
    c = r[i] ? r[i][1] : d;
    if (r[i]) break;
  }
  c = c.length != 2 ? d : c;
  if (l[c]) c = l[c];
 return c;
}

Once saved, add the variable to your Cookiebot CMP tag in GTM by setting the "Language" dropdown to "By GTM Variable" and select the  {{Current Language}} variable.

mceclip0.png

This custom JavaScript variable is not dependent on Cookiebot and can be used in any way you see fit.

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Comments

5 comments

Date Votes
  • Ilya Averyanov

    Hi Jacob,

    Thank you for your documentation!

    What should I write in currentUserPagePathname.indexOf(" ") if I want English to be displayed on my mydomain.com root domain, while German to be displayed on my de,mydomain.com subdomain?

    Kind regards,
    Ilya

    0
  • Stephen Greis

    Hi,

    you don't have to write custom javascript for that. Simply do the following steps:

    • In GTM create a new variable of type "javascript variable" and name it "Current Language".
    • Set as name of the global variable: document.documentElement.lang
    • Save the GTM variable
    • Edit the Cookiebot Tag
    • As "Language" set "By GTM variable"
    • As "Language variable" set: {{Current Language}}
    • Save the Tag

    That's it...

     

    0
  • Richard van der Velde

    Hi Stephen,

    Thanks for the tip. It's definitely useful, but probably not quite enough by it self.
    For example on this page, this property returns "en-US". We would have to trim off the "-US" part to make this work. Using this instead should do the trick: document.documentElement.lang.substring(0,2)

    This requires that the lang attribute is set and actually reflects the preferred language though.

     

     

    0
  • Frida Rydén

    Hi!
    In the instruction: https://support.cookiebot.com/hc/en-us/articles/360003793854-Google-Tag-Manager-deployment    the Cookiebot CMP Tag trigger is set as "Consent Initialisation - All Pages", and in this instruction the trigger is set as "All Pages". Which one is the correct one?

    0
  • Richard van der Velde

    Hi Frida Rydén,

    "Consent Initialisation - All Pages" is the correct trigger to use.

    It appears the screenshot needs to be updated. Thanks for pointing this out, and I apologize for the confusion.

    0

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