SharePoint 2010 Variations Propagating changes on pages even though Variation settings are set not to do so

Question

Dear All,

Overview: Kindly note that i am working on an Internet site that is built on top of SharePoint Server 2010.The site is bilingual: English and Arabic; for that SharePoint Variations are used with the English site as source, in order to reflect any created items from the English side to the Arabic side.

Till now, site and page creation are working just fine, but the issue is with republishing an existing page.

Details: Suppose that i have a page called "About Us" that is created at the English side with an English content, when the Variations job kicks, the page is created at the Arabic side and i go and translate the content to Arabic. However, in any case when i update the content at the English side and republish, the changes are reflected to the Arabic side and the Arabic content is overwritten with the new English content causing me to re-translate the content. In other words, i don't need the variations to reflect the English content on the Arabic site once a certain page is repuplished

In Addition, the variation settings from the Root Sit Settings are as follows:

Kindly advise for a solution

Best Regards.

Answer 1

I believe that behavior is by design with SharePoint variations. Although the republished page propagates from the source to the target variation, it should only exist as a new draft page in the target variation, correct? Therefore, the viewer (on the internet) would still see that last published version of the page in Arabic, not the new English draft version. I believe you could simply discard (delete) the draft page from the Arabic variation site if you did not need it but I am unsure it that would disrupt the variations relationships. In that case (discarding the English draft) you would not need to retranslate the content.