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Donia Strand's avatar
Donia Strand
Iron Contributor
Jul 04, 2018

SharePoint Online Variations - alternative?

On June 28th, a plan for change (MC143381) was announced through the message center on an update for machine translation services from SharePoint Online. It states that "With this change, your organi...
SharePoint Online
jcgonzalezmartin's avatar
jcgonzalezmartin
MVP
Jul 05, 2018
Well, for now there is not an alternative to variations so I don't think they are going to remove the feature soon...I agree this message can point to that direction, but have not heard anything confirming this and also what alternatives we have
Donia Strand's avatar
Donia Strand
Iron Contributor
Jul 05, 2018

Thanks, Juan Carlos. What worries me most is the statement that "This change will affect your user’s ability to create new variation labels in order to schedule translation activities or workflows."
So, it would seem that after September 2018, if you have variations, you can never add new languages if need be? That is worrisome, as it is hard to project just when you may need to add a language, and there is no alternative to move to another model. 

We've never used machine translation, with the kind of content we translate, it is all done by professional translators - machine translation could introduce safety issues for us. The Bing translator APIs don't help us at all with being able to host multiple languages on a website, and MUI is only helpful to a point. 
Would really appreciate a little more information on the deprecation of variation labels if anyone knows and much thanks. It would help us greatly with planning. Much thanks.

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