SharePoint Multi-Language Variation Site

We will use the SharePoint Online variations feature to create multi-language site.

There will be a source site (most probably in English) where most of the authoring and creation of content will take place and there will be another target site (in your native language) which will be created with the help of 'Machine Translation Service'.

In the above figure it can be seen that we will first create a variation site in English and there will be target site in Hindi which will be auto generated from English.

First to begin please make sure we have following things in place,

• Activate SharePoint Server Publishing Infrastructure feature on the ‘Root Site’ collection
• ‘Root site’ is of type ‘Publishing Site’(in my case, http://sp2013labapp01/sites/demo )
• Language Pack Hindi should be installed on all the Servers in SharePoint Farm

At the end of this article we will have 2 links,

• Source Site in English: http://sp2013labapp01/sites/demo/en-us
• Target Site In Hindi : http://sp2013labapp01/sites/demo/hi-in

Configure Variation Settings for your ‘Root Site’

In this step we will configure which and what things to create variation for.

1. Go to Site Settings of your ‘Root Site’
2. Click on ‘Variation Settings’
3. Make sure the variation settings are as shown in the screenshot below
   
4. These are the default settings and easy to go for this tutorial. Click on ‘OK’

Create a Source Variation Site (in English)

1. Go to Site Settings of your ‘Root Site’
2. Click on ‘Variation Labels’ -> Click on ‘New Label’
   
3. In Site Template Language, select the language to be used in the multilingual user interface of the source site. In our case ‘English’. Select appropriate Locale, I will go with ‘English (United States)’. Under Variation Home Location, Just type ‘/’. Type the label as ‘en-us’. Refer screen below for the details,
   
4. Select ‘Publishing Site with Workflow’ in the Publishing Site Template
5. Enter the email address of person to be contacted for this label and click ‘ok’

Create Target Variation Site (in Hindi)

1. Go to Site Settings of your ‘Root Site’
2. Click on ‘Variation Labels’ -> Click on ‘New Label’
3. Select the Site Template Language as ‘Hindi’ and Locale as ‘Hindi’. Click on ‘Continue’
   
4. Enter Label Name as hi-in and appropriate description and display Name
5. Select ‘Publishing Sites, Lists with Variations, and All Pages’ under Hierarchy Creation and click on ‘Continue’
6. On this screen we want to enable both ‘Human Translation’ as well as ‘Machine Translation’
   
7. Click on ‘Continue’ and on Target Label Behaviour  screen select ’Automatically update target variation pages’ and click on ‘Continue’
   
8. Review the configuration once again and click on ‘Finish’

Now we have source site and target site configured but it’s not created yet! We need to create hierarchy between source site and target site.

Create Hierarchy

1. Go to Site Settings of your ‘Root Site’
2. Click ‘Variation Labels’
3. Click on ‘Create Hierarchies’
4. You can check the logs under ‘Variation Logs’

In the background it will run a timer job to create the sites and its hierarchies, You can run this jobs manually.

Once these jobs are executed successfully, you can examine the variation logs and it should show successful as below.

If you browse through both the urls you can see that there are two exact same sites created, One in English(en-us) and other in Hindi(hi-in)

Publishing the Page in Source Site

Let’s create a demo page ‘Bob Marley’ in our source site. Our ‘Machine Translation Service’ should create the same page in the target (Hindi) site

Now go to the Source site url (http://sp2013labapp01/sites/demo/en-us) and create a new page and name it as ‘Bob Marley’

Change the page Layout to ‘Image on Left’ and start constructing the page. Insert some image on left and add some text content on your right.

Page should look something like this,

Click on ‘Check it in’ from the ribbon and check in the page. After that it will ask for ‘Publish this draft’. Complete that as well.

On the Start "Page Approval’ page click on start. This will initiate the page approval workflow.

You have to get it approved from the user who is member of ‘approver’ list.

Imp Note : It is necessary that the page is approved and published else it won’t be translated !

For now execute the jobs mentioned previously, Manually.

Once completed successfully you will be able to browse the same page in our target site as shown below.

Happy SharePointing !!!