<Disclaimer>This is personal notes of what I retained during the session. This can be incomplete, partially right or wrong. It is just part of the notes I took and what retained my attention. Nothing prevents the user to get more information on their favorite web site.</Disclaimer>

The logical elements of a page that may be impacted by multi-lingual are logo, navigation control, custom controls, site assets and authored and translated content. Some elements of the master page can also be impacted, like the page footer.

By installing the language packs you get the MUI (Multi-lingual UI). It gives the ability to users to switch to another language. But some site templates don’t support the MUI, the property SupportsMultilingualUI can be checked to whether or not it is supported.

Regarding the managed metadata, you have to select a source or a working language, thus, terms can have multiple languages. Nevertheless, it is not possible to import terms and specifying the language in any way and imports the terms in the base language. This needs a custom solution.

Variation features is a answer to support multi-lingual solutions of SharePoint. It requires the publishing feature. Variations are using different sites, one of them is the source. The Master Pages, Page Layouts, Reusable Content is common. A Relationships hidden list keeps the relations between the variations. There is a one-to-many relationship between the source and targets variations.

Configuration steps are : specify the variation settings, create the labels and hierarchies and finally set the page propagation model that can be either automatic or on-demand.

When landing on a site, we arrive on the VariationRoot.aspx page, this is changed when we activate the variations. This page will look at the preferred language code from the browser, check if a matching variation exists, and direct the user to the corresponding site.

Publishing pages, referenced resources (images, etc) are propagated to target variations. List content can be propagated. But list, master pages, reusable content are not propagated.

By default, references to resources are not changed. It means that on the target variations will use the source variations’ resources.

Creating new sites, pages, updating pages are automatically propagated by default. It is useful when localized content has to appear on all the target labels.

In the site manager, it is possible to manually create a new label site. For a specific page, it is possible to copy to one specific label. All updates on source pages that have target labels will have a new version on the target created.

On-demand propagation creates the target sites, but not the pages. This has to be done manually.

Search ML support (does not need to install the ML packs to be supported) : Work breaking, stemming, noise words. But, automatic language detection, spell checking, property extraction, offensive content filtering is only supported in FAST.

Some considerations such as in what language the query has to be performed (configured in the query results web part properties), which language the results will be displayed, are all results displayed the same.

In some circumstances, sites may be navigated in different way between languages. If dealing with content approval, this has to be know earlier as it will change the configuration of the workflow on the source language and the propagation model. Should all the languages be live at the same time and do all the content has to be translated ?

What has to be taken in account is also the resource files for custom code and expression builders, custom language selection, error pages, search experience, site map.

It is necessary to create a script to enable the MUI on all sub-sites, but blogs and meeting workspaces do not support the MUI. 50 languages variations are supported in a site collection. Variations cannot be changed afterwards.