Multilingual and Multi-regional Support in Umbraco
If you want to provide different content to users based in different languages, countries or regions Umbraco 8 makes it easy to edit and optimize the site for high rankings in local searches.
Umbraco has supported multi-regional and multilingual sites from its earliest roots back in 2008. However, support for Multilingual and Multi-regional variants has substantially improved the editing interface.
Based on Google's definitions:
- A multilingual site is any website that offers content in different language variants, for example a Swiss company may serve content in French, Italian and German, or a Welsh company may serve content in Welsh and English; whereas
- A multiregional site targets different content in different countries, sometimes all in one language, sometimes in multiple languages.
Umbraco language variants make it possible to easily manage both multilingual and multiregional sites.
During the initial design of a site, it is important for Editors, Designers and Developers to understand the content rules, for example:
- Is all content in every language and in every region of the site?
- Is there a master language with a superset of all content, and variants that may contain some or all content?
- Could there be some content that may appear in a language variants that may not appear on the master variant?
- Are some Umbraco fields not translated? For example an event date field may not need to vary by variant;
These decisions fundamentally impact the design of the site, and mistakes can be costly as you may have to rework your content if you later change your mind.
New features in Umbraco enable side by side editing of language variants so that content can be copied between language variants. However, complex sites may benefit from also using the third party package Translation Manager, which can further improve the management of multilingual sites.
