Multilingual Searchability for Site Name and Term Store

Brass Contributor

Hello,

As someone who works constantly with multilingual organizations, I do want to take the opportunity to share some frustrations around the limits of the current multilingual support. While many are grateful to see some subtle but useful improvements like elevating the labelling of translations into the UI (e.g., Site Name, Site Description, Navigation Links, etc.) there are some really big gaps for large enterprise clients. I'll focus on a couple here:

 

1. Site Name

Currently the Site Name is only searchable by its original name, not any of its translations. A French user, for example, may not know the Site by any other name than what he/she sees in French, so this result in Search is very confusing.

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I understand this is likely the current product of the fact that only original values are being indexed, (while translations are being swapped in on the fly) we do need to be able to search by by crucial properties in alternate languages otherwise we are delivering a seriously sub-par experience to these users.

 

My only current workaround is to add the French Site Name to the site's English Description which does help connect the dots but does not solve the root problem.

 

Example adding the French site name in the English description

DavidFrancoeur_2-1631132173731.png

2. Term Store

This same problem plagues the effective searchability of metadata. While I am the first to applaud the updated Term Store, the inability to search by translations is a huge thorn in the side of any organization attempting to leverage effective content management.

 

DavidFrancoeur_4-1631132936716.png

 

Any updates would be greatly appreciated and I'll be happy to disseminate them.

1 Reply

Hello @DavidFrancoeur 

 

Thank you for bringing that up, I totally agree with you! I am also implementing a bilingual environment and I am struggling with the searchability of the translation from the Term Store. I spent a considerable amount of time translating each term and only to find that they are not searchable is a very big disapointment and a huge thorn in my foot for change managment. The only reason we used this feature is to to encourage better collaboration between our French and English speaking employees.

 

Also, I would like to add that the communication sites can be bilingual, but it is not the case for team sites. The homepage of a team sharepoint site is therefore available in only one language and the pages cannot be translated.

 

I would love to see solutions to those pain points.