Multilingual Pages
Resources that cover migrating multilingual Confluence pages to SharePoint.
Note
Multilingual pages are pages, whose content has been translated to more than one language.How does the translation work in Confluence?
There are third-party apps that enable users to translate pages in Confluence. WikiTraccs currently supports Scroll Translations.
How does the translation work in SharePoint?
SharePoint has a history of more or less usable approaches to multilingual user interfaces and content.
WikiTraccs supports different ways of migrating page translations from Confluence to SharePoint:
Note
Some options will be supported in a future version of WikiTraccs and are not yet available.- migrating only one language, the translation with most content in Confluence
- migrating only one language, as chosen via configuration (not yet supported)
- migrating all translations to a single SharePoint page (default mode, supported as of WikiTraccs 1.4.2)
- migrating each translation to a separate page in SharePoint (not yet supported)
Refer to the following pages for more information
1 - Info about Scroll Translations
This article provides some background information about the Scroll Translations solution.
What is Scroll Translations? How does it make Confluence pages multilingual?
Scroll Translations is a third-party app by K15t that allows to translate Confluence pages to different languages.
Under the hood Scroll Translations creates a macro for every language the page is translated to. Those macros are stored in the page content.
The user can choose which language they want to see in Confluence. Only one language is displayed at a given time.
WikiTraccs can see all languages at once when it migrates a page and can act on them.
2 - Migrating all Languages to one SharePoint Page
The easiest apprach to migrating all Confluence page languages to SharePoint.
Please have a look at the release notes of WikiTraccs 1.4.2 for details.
3 - Migrating to Multilingual Pages in SharePoint Online
This article covers migrating Confluence pages to SharePoint Online, using the out-of-the-box multilingual pages features of SharePoint.
Note
This capability will be added in one of the next WikiTraccs releases.A brief introduction to multilingual SharePoint
Over time, there have been many approaches to multilinguality in SharePoint, both out-of-the-box ones and from third parties.
When searching for information on multilingual SharePoint sites remember to look at the date of information you find. Documentation about multilingual SharePoint pages should be newer than 1-2 years, and for SharePoint Online, not SharePoint on-premises.
There are also different approaches depending on whether you want to translate the SharePoint user interface (list titles, content types etc.), or the content of pages (text, web parts).
We shall focus on modern approaches to translating content of modern pages in SharePoint Online.
Two approaches to make pages appear in different languages are common:
- providing multiple languages on one page
- using the out-of-the-box feature for multilingual modern SharePoint pages
The following section looks at the second option, the out-of-the-box feature.
How do multilingual pages work in SharePoint?
Microsoft has an out-of-the-box feature for creating page translations documented here: Create multilingual SharePoint sites, pages, and news.
It is disabled by default and has to be switched on.
Notes from the SharePoint documentation
Pages are not translated automatically. Each page created in your default language can have a corresponding page in a chosen target language that you, or someone you assign, manually translates. After you translate such a page and publish it, it will automatically be displayed to users who prefer that language.
Changes to the original, source page or to other translation pages are not automatically synced with all translation pages. Each translation page must be updated manually.
The language displayed to a user will depend on their personal language and region settings.
We recommend using the steps in this article for multilingual sites. However, if you are using SharePoint Server versions earlier than 2019, see Using the variations feature for multilingual sites.
The multilingual features described in this article are not available on subsites.
Multilingual features will only be available on sites that have publishing infrastructure settings disabled.
When this feature is enabled, a separate page can be created for each supported language. SharePoint takes care of routing the user to the page that matches their profile language.
And that’s basically it. Each language get’s a separate SharePoint page. The pages are connected by metadata.
WikiTraccs can create those translated pages, based on translations it finds in the source Confluence pages.