Multiple languages in a source Publication?

Question

Not that I'd recommend it as a good practice, but we could manually create items in various languages in a given Publication and localize them in source Publication(s).

Would this setup work with Translation Manager (i.e. can we have a source Publication with more-than-one Language)?

I understand more typical scenarios include:

• Source Publications in a single language sending translation to one or more separate target languages
• The target language(s) might be specific to a country and/or region
• A target Publication might include one or more languages

Answer 1

If you separate the content by language into folders it might be possible to make Translation Manager work with this setup (there are not enough details here to say for sure one way or the other).

You can configure individual folders, structure groups, and categories for translation (at least if you are on a fairly new version of Tridion). You can do this folder based configuration on both source/and target level in the BluePrint. But you obviously still work within the blueprint - you can't make a single English component be translated to both a French and a German component in the target publication.

It's probably best if you have a design where only components (and maybe keywords) are translated - not pages or structure groups, as they can't share configuration with the components.

I would not recommend configuring at a lot of different folders for two main reasons: 1) Performance will be worse as TM needs to load a lot more data to sort out the folder structure and 2) it can quickly become very difficult to track what TM configuration is used in various situations - first you will lose track, and if you push it you might even get Translation Manager to lose track. :)

But if you just have a few top level folders for the languages you should not run into a lot of problems.

There are alternative solutions - for example keeping hidden (for the regular user) "shadow" source publications under your actual source publication with each item localized and in the correct language using the Tridion core and TM event systems. This would not be pleasant to implement or maintain, but I guess some people likes a challenge.

Answer 2

I think it would be quite messy to have a top level content publication with multiple languages, but to try and answer some of your questions and add some of my own thoughts

1) Translation manager - I'd imagine this would be a little bit of hassle as TM needs to know what the language is and where to localise in a child publication, the configuration and rules around it wouldn't be very nice.

2) Publication targets - I don't think there would be too much issue here.

3) Content Delivery - I can think of a load of scenarios here where querying for content would likely mean querying for the content / language, where normally CD is happy to assume anything in a given publication ID is of the same language.. (well it doesn't put the developers creating it do.... multi-language would mean you need to do a lot of extra work on top

4) CMS Security - how do you manage different teams in the world working on different language contents? This could start international wars!

5) Template logic - checking if something is local/shared etc is pretty much out the window.

.. I think in short, it's a really bad idea, I'm struggling to think of good reasons to have it, are you faced with a client where this would make sense?

Thanks

John