Multilingual News and Pages in SharePoint
In episode 135 of the 365 Message Center Show, I interviewed an expert to discuss multilingual news and pages in SharePoint. If you haven't taken a listen, please go listen to the interview with Sébastien Levert – featured at the end of the episode. I have added an episode player at the bottom of this post for your convenience.
Who Needs Multilingual?
You need to identify which sites actually need multilingual capabilities. Sébastien suggested that collaboration sites don't necessarily need this capability and you should focus on your Internet communication sites. It doesn't mean you can't have multilingual capabilities on your collaboration sites, but you do have to keep in mind the work that has to go into creating those variation pages.
Another point to consider: which languages do you as an organization actually need to support? Just because you have associate's in your organization that speak a certain language, doesn't necessarily mean you need to have support for that language in your intranet.
Indicators to consider are:
- What is normally used when communicating with your employees?
- What is legally required – meaning does your does the local government require you to provide services in a different language?
- Is an additional language required for clear communications with your employees?
Use Microsoft Teams
We also discussed how the creation of the variation pages for each language is automatically done. However, the content is not translated automatically. Translation is a manual process at this moment, which means it takes time to accomplish. There's also the potential for multiple changes needed to your variations over time. You will need to discuss modifications that need to be made to the translated pages and collaborate when problems with translations are highlighted by employees. Sébastien suggested to utilize a tool, such as Microsoft Teams, to enable collaboration with your translators and content owners. This will help make sure issues are addressed and plans are made for when translations need to be done.
SharePoint Pages Include Multiple Languages
Lastly, until a news post or page is translated into the user's selected language, news and page content is shown in the default intranet language. In the past, you might have had a separate Internet for each language, where everything on the site was of one language. With the new solution, you may see mixed content on pages depending upon how quickly translated content can be added.
This was an informative interview and I hope you will check out the episode. Thanks again Sébastien!
