Power Sitefinity Multilingual Support with Machine Translation

Creating the right piece of content to boost your business is always hard. First you need good authors and marketers that understand the value you bring to the world, and then you need the right tools to generate high quality content. The Progress Sitefinity team is here to help with the latter. With Sitefinity you can even simplify or automate the content creation process with cognitive AI services, which I spoke more about in my recent post.

We all know that the above is already a difficult and time consuming task, and it can become a nightmare when there’s a multilingual requirement added on top. Can you find the marketer(s) or author(s) you need to cover your desired languages – and even if you can, do you have the resources to hire them? Spreading your business across multiple cultures requires a lot of effort but this shouldn’t discourage you. There is another solution here that can reduce costs and help you automate these tasks. Just as it helps with other aspects of content creation, cognitive services can be leveraged to translate your content.

Before we continue I would like to step back a little and give you more context about Sitefinity. Our multilingual capabilities have long been one of our key differentiating features. The platform supports unlimited language versions for the content itself in terms of pages and items, and as well for the backend for which we support many language packages out of the box. On top of this, the translation module helps automate the process through translation services or a machine translation connector.

With the release of Sitefinity 11.0, we introduced a machine translation API that allows you to hook up to any machine translation service and translate your content immediately.

What Are the Pros and Cons?

The biggest benefits are a fast time to market and cost efficiency. The translation happens immediately and you no longer need to wait hours or days for it, no matter how many languages you need to support.

One of the possible downsides is to have a translation which is not 100% fluent or in worst case slightly inaccurate due to limitations in the services. Keep in mind though that those services are trained on a daily basis, and this concern should decrease over time. A person with basic knowledge in the specific languages can also quickly scan the translations to increase the overall quality, while the heavy lifting is now done by a machine 😊.

Ready to Use Machine Translation Connectors for My Website

There are many machine translation services on the market that you can use. For your convenience we implemented a Systran connector, which can be found here. Follow the steps from the readme file to setup your website to use it.

The end result looks like this:

Send for translation

Language options

Connector options

After simply selecting your content, your language, and your translation service as in the screenshots above, you’re done! Just like that, you can deliver your content to your users in any language.

Conclusion

Supporting multiple languages is a hard task, but with the right tools you can accomplish your goals. With Sitefinity’s extensible capabilities you can plug modern cognitive services directly into your CMS, and easily provide additional productivity to your marketing teams.

For more on our cognitive services don’t forget to check out my last post, which showed how our cognitive AI services can automatically add tags, alternative text, and even summaries to your content.