Monday, June 3, 2013

Investigating Translation Services in SharePoint 2013

There are a few parts to Translation Services.

The first is the ability to translate a document within Word Web App (interesting to note that Office Web Apps now runs separately to SharePoint 2013, whereas it was previously installed as a component to SharePoint 2010).  All you have to do is to click File, and then Translate.  You'll be given a list of languages to translate to, and your document will then be translated.  Of course, this is a systematic translation and won't be completely accurate, but it'll be a good indication. See this video - SharePoint 2013 Translation Service - to see it in action.

Secondly, and more impressively for developers and administrators, is the ability to translate documents from within the SP2013 interface.  Out of the box, there are PowerShell commands to perform translations, but a small piece of coding can be done (see: SharePoint 2013 translation services) that will allow you to add context or ribbon options that perform translations for you.  These can be done either synchronously (you wait for the translation to complete before you continue) - or asynchronously (the translations are carried out in the background and will be ready for viewing at a later stage, often within seconds).  This can be tied into workflow, so a document could be uploaded to a library, and the translation could then be placed into a language-specific library or sent to a human translator for approval.

The most interesting part of the asynchronous process (as demonstrated in the video above) is that entire document libraries can be translated at once.  A copy of each file is created, with the language code added to the file name after translation.

Finally, we come to Variations.  If you intend for your entire site to be multilingual, you would activate Variations.  This will allow all content - navigation, pages, even list items - to be different (or varying) across languages or locales.

If "Variations" have been enabled, SP2013 can prepare an XLIFF translation package for selected documents, and these can then be sent to, or downloaded by, an external translation agency.  When they have finished translating these documents, they send back, or upload, the translation package, and SP2013 will carry out the operations required to make these documents or pages available to that language variation.

For more info on Variations, see Variations overview in SharePoint Server 2013
...and for more info on Translation Services, see Introduction to Machine Translation Services in SharePoint 2013

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