With organizations around the world enabling remote work for their teams, it is essential now, more than ever, to ensure that information on your intranet is readily available to your users. Using communication sites in SharePoint for Microsoft 365, you can now create a flexible, intelligent intranet in multiple languages!
The multilingual publishing feature for SharePoint communication sites, now rolled out worldwide, enables you to create and translate pages, set translator roles, and get email alerts when pages are ready to be translated, updated, and published. All of this comes on top of the rich and flexible pages and news creation experience in SharePoint. Everything is built to give the user the best experience possible. Let's jump in to see how multilingual publishing for modern SharePoint works. Here is a quick overview video:
So how does it work?
Once a communication site has been created in the default language, the site owner can enable the multilingual publishing feature and choose the additional languages to support on that site.
Once the feature has been enabled and languages added, the site owner can assign individual users, security groups, and Office 365 groups as translators for each of the languages.
Then, page authors can make copies of pages created in the default language. The content in the copies can then be manually translated by the translator who’d be notified when there is a new default language page requiring translation or when an existing default language page is updated. When translations are published the author of the default language will be notified as well. Published translation pages are automatically shown in the users’ language, including in the News web part and the Highlighted content web part.
When page approvals are turned on, the default language pages and the translation pages must be approved and published before the translation pages are available to everyone who has access to the page. This extra layer of review and approval can help ensure that incorrect information is not published.
Site navigation, hub navigation, site name and site footer can also be translated. The content there is first created in the site default language and then translators can log in and update navigation, site name etc. in their preferred language. Users will automatically see pages and news in their preferred language if its published. If not available, and they would like to view pages in other available languages, they will be able to do so using the dropdown menu in the top right corner of the page.
Communication between teams, managers and everyone in between is one of the most important things an organization can facilitate at this time. With many teams spread all over the globe, Microsoft is proud to be able to provide a tool built into modern SharePoint that helps to ensure your information is easily delivered to your team. Get more information, exact steps and troubleshooting tips in our article: Create multilingual communication sites, pages, and news.
You can also view a video demo of the feature here or hear more about the builiding of the feature in this Intrazone podcast.