Multi-language variations - How do you localize navigation?

1
votes

We are creating the variation structure for a multilingual 2010 site. We would like our navigation to be based upon the site/subsite structure of the site collection. The problem is that the out-of-the-box SharePoint navigation creates links from the site name, which happens to be localized to the source site. We are ok with the URL's having the source site's name in it, we just want the navigation to use localized texts.

I know that a work-around is to turn off site-based navigation on the target site and do it manually, but this will become cumbersome as we anticipate having a few hundred subsites.

An example of what we would like our navigation to look like:

EN-US (English Source Site)

Link in Navigation | URL

Home | www.consoso.com/en-us/Pages/default.aspx

Work | www.consoso.com/en-us/Work/Pages/default.aspx

de-DE (German target site)

Link in Navigation | URL

Heim | www.consoso.com/de-de/Pages/default.aspx

Arbeit | www.consoso.com/de-de/Work/Pages/default.aspx

1
sharepointsharepoint-2010variations

1 Answers

0
votes

I think you don't have that much options. For each web, you need to enable the multilanguage option; it doesn't seem like this is inherited. Any changes made to the subweb's title don't automatically reflect in the navigation of the parent site. I tried like this:

  • Created an English site and enabled Dutch language on it.
  • Adapted the site title to postfix EN for English and NL for Dutch.
  • Created an English subweb, language settings are disabled by default. I called the subweb 'subweb' and verified that it displayed on the navigation of the parent site.
  • Adapted the site title for the subweb and postfixed it again with 'EN' and 'NL'. These changes don't reflect to the parent web in any way, it still lists 'subweb' for both languages.
  • If you now edit the navigation links for the parent, you can change the titles for both languages and those translate ok.

So I don't think you have that many options, it's just not there ootb. What could work (and perhaps is the most easiest) is creating a timer job which recursively processes your site collections / webs and recreates the navigation links for all subsites. With a little logic there, you could also discard any other (external) links.

But perhaps you found a good alternative in the meantime? I'm also researching the multilanguage / variation options, so I'm eager to find out :)