Migrating to Multilingual Pages in SharePoint Online
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.