Recommendations for using multiple languages

In this article we make some recommendations about using multilingual features in Atlas. Following this advice should give the best experience for your users.

This article has been trimmed to remove out of date information. We will add new recommendations soon, but for now you can start with the following.

Workspaces and Page content languages

We recommend guiding users to first create page content in the same language as the workspace where it is stored, and then using the Microsoft page translations to create copies of the page for each language which can then be manually translated. This way you do not actually need to create a workspace per language and therefore you have less content to manage overall.

When a user has their Browser Language set to a supported language the version of the page they see will automatically be the one translated into their language - if that translation does not exist they will see the default page whichever language that was created in.

You can learn more about setting up menus and metadata translations from this article: Enable Translations for News and Pages in a Communications Workspace

You can still choose to create one workspace per language, and if you need to provide different versions of documents in different languages this may be a good option.

If you're unsure please ask your Atlas project team - we'd be happy to discuss your requirements and make a recommendation.

Navigation

To ensure users are able to navigate easily through the system we would recommend the following steps be applied either by your IT function or by individuals:

• Set browser homepages to the Atlas homepage in the correct language for that user (or ensure that all languages have translations available for the shared Home)
• Provide education regarding the content you expect your users to consume
• Provide links in the Global Navigation to the homepage in each language. This menu is security trimmed so users will only see these links if they can access them. You can learn how to set translations for the Global Navigation and Metadata here: Translations in the Term Store