Developing Multi lingual Sites

Question

Hi all,

I have a requirement where are there are multi-lingual sites in SharePoint 2007 (such as English, German, French, Spanish etc.).
The basic content will in English (content web parts, lists etc) and authors will be putting all the content. The content will be quite overwhelming in English version.

Now, it will be towering task to replicate in different languages (German, French, Spanish) and highly monotonous/manual .
After some research, I found that Microsoft provides a translation tool . In this tool, we can type or enter an URL (such as English) and it will automatic generate the target language (such as German or French or Spanish etc.). It does on the fly.

Apparently, if we a page which has 4 lists, 5 web parts, then this tool should translate whole content.

My doubt is, how can this tool into SharePoint with these conditions:

1) When a German reader this site, he should be able to switch the default language (English) to German through "Select a language" drop down.
2) Language ("German") is selected, all the contents (lists, webparts) must be translated as well.
3) This tool should be visible on all the pages on this site.

Can somebody advice me?
Thank you.

Cheers,
--Aaroh  

 

Answer 1

Hi,

This white paper provides information and guidelines for using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 in scenarios where content is managed across different languages. It details most of the functionality provided by Office SharePoint Server 2007 and suggests how to use it to manage multilingual scenarios.
Plan for building multilingual solutions by using SharePoint Products and Technologies (http://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?LinkId=79322).

Note:
SharePoint is not able to automatically translate the pages for you. It only creates secondary language copies (say, under the German and English brances of the site) of the page created under the main language (Spanish). Those copies are indeed copies and not translated into the secondary languages

I also would recommend to check this
- http://www.sharepointnutsandbolts.com/2008/12/building-multi-lingual-sharepoint-sites.html
- http://planetmoss.blogspot.com/2007/12/multilingual-moss.html

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Best Regards, Ammar MCT

Answer 2

Hi,
Refer the following posts ,
1. Planning for Multilingual sites white paper
 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc262942.aspx 

2. MOSS Multilingual sites deployment - Code project
 http://www.codeproject.com/KB/sharepoint/MOSS_multilingual.aspx 

Thanks,