Enable Translations for News and Pages in a Workspace

The Translations feature is provided by Microsoft for Modern Workspaces. This feature allows you to create different versions of the same page for different languages, and adds a language switcher to translated pages which lets a user set their default language for any translated content.

This is not an Atlas feature but it is important to how our system works for multilingual scenarios.

In this article:

• Choose a language to view translated content
• Enable Translations for a Workspace
  • Advanced settings
• Create a translation for a page
• Disable translations or remove languages
  
  

Choose a language to view translated content

For content which has already been translated, users can click the ... action menu at the top right of a page and choose the desired language:

In general though they will not need to do this as they will be shown the correct language based on their Browser Language.

Enable Translations for a Workspace

To get started, you'll need Owner permissions on the target Communications workspace. Translation is not available for other workspace types at this time.

1. Open the settings menu from the M365 bar (cogwheel icon) and click Site information, then in the panel that appears click View all site settings near the bottom of the panel:
                    >               
2. In the next page, under Site administration click Language settings:
   
3. Now, turn on the Enable pages and news to be translated into multiple languages option:
   
4. The default language of your site will be displayed by default, but you can use the search / dropdown box to type or browse for another language to add:
   
5. After choosing a language you can pick the users who will be required to translate content for the new language in this workspace:
   
6. Once you're happy with the languages added and the translators for each language, click Save at the bottom of the page to confirm. You're now ready to start translating content.
   
   

Advanced settings

One additional "advanced" setting is available after clicking the Show advanced settings link which allows you to Overwrite translations for certain parts of pages. Generally we don't recommend using this setting. You can read the description below and decide if you want to use it:

Create a translation for a page

Once you have enabled translations in your workspace, go to the page you want to translate to begin. You need to be one of the translators specified in the previous steps.

Please note that you should build out your page with web parts etc. before following these steps, because edits to the original page will not be copied into the translations.

Each translation becomes a separate page which will require separate content updates.

1. Click the Translation button at the top of the page:
   
2. This will open a panel on the right showing the current translation status for each available language. If your page has not been translated before, or there is a new language available for translations, you'll see something like this:
   
3. To start translating into Spanish in this example, click the Create link under Spanish. This will create the translation, which you can then view and start editing by clicking View:
   
4. You'll land on the page, with the name Translate to <language>: <Original Name> to make it clear the translation has not been done yet. You can now simply start editing the page and swapping out the text, translating the web part titles etc.
5. Once you're done, make sure you Publish the page.
   
   

Disable translations or remove languages

If you need to disable translations for a workspace, or remove specific languages from being available for translations, return to the Language settings screen as explained in the first section of this article.

To remove a specific language, simply click the Remove language link to the right of it:

To completely disable translations for the workspace, simply toggle the Enable pages and news to be translated into multiple languages option to Off: