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The PointFire Blog
Tips on using SharePoint in a multilingual environment

SharePoint supports 50 languages but PointFire lets you translate to 111 language, here's how.

16.05.22 07:22 PM Comment(s) By Martin Laplante

SharePoint currently supports 50 languages. Microsoft used to say it supported 51 languages, but two of the versions of Serbian (Latin) were the same, and in 2020 they updated their language codes for Serbian to a more current standard, bringing the count down to 50.


Until recently we used to say that the PointFire Translator supports all 50 SharePoint languages except for a few and that really bugged us. No longer!  With the addition of support for Basque and Galician, there is no longer any "except". PointFire Translator now supports all 50 languages that SharePoint recognizes, plus over 60 more languages, everything from Afrikaans to Zulu.


Did you know that Spanish is not the only official language of Spain?  There are four major languages that are co-official languages plus some variants of them.  Spanish, or more specifically Castilian, is the most common one, spoken throughout the country.  In the middle ages Castilian was spoken mainly in the small northern Kingdom of Castile, but as the kingdom grew and merged with its neighbors, Castilian gradually replaced most of the other Latin-based languages in Spain, to the point that it became known as "Spanish".  In South America, the language was introduced long before the time that the language changed its name to "Español", so in many South American countries it is still called "Castellano".

The other major languages of Spain are Catalan, Galician, and Basque.  Of these, Catalan and Galician are also Latin-based languages.  Catalan translation has been available for many years.  There is a high demand for it.  But as the teams at Microsoft Research and Azure Cognitive Services brought out new languages every few months, Galician, and Basque were late to arrive.  Galician was because there are not a lot of corpora of translated documents available, and those are translated to and from Spanish not English, so it had to wait for technology to catch up.  Basque does have quite a lot of translated documents, in Spanish and in French and others, since it is an official language of Basque Country, the larger part of which is in Spain, with the northern part in France.  The problem with Basque is that it is a language isolate, meaning it is not related to any other language.  It is not part of the larger Indo-European language family, nor any other language family.  It is the only language isolate spoken in Europe.  That makes it difficult to translate, when it has little in common with any other language.

In mid April 2022, the long wait was over.  PointFire already had the language codes ready to go, so as soon as Azure Cognitive Services rolled out the new version, PointFire Translator started using it.  So now there is no longer any language that PointFire 365 will support but only if you translate it manually, every SharePoint language can now be translated with PointFire Translator.


In case you're a language nerd like us, here's the full list, with SharePoint languages highlighted in teal:

    1. Afrikaans
    2. Albanian
    3. Amharic
    4. Arabic
    5. Armenian
    6. Assamese
    7. Azerbaijani
    8. Bangla
    9. Bashkir
    10. Basque
    11. Bosnian
    12. Bulgarian
    13. Cantonese (Traditional)
    14. Catalan
    15. Chinese (Literary)
    16. Chinese Simplified
    17. Chinese Traditional
    18. Croatian
    19. Czech
    20. Danish
    21. Dari
    22. Divehi
    23. Dutch
    24. English
    25. Estonian
    26. Faroese
    27. Fijian
    28. Filipino
    29. Finnish
    30. French
    31. French (Canada)
    32. Galician
    33. Georgian
    34. German
    35. Greek
    36. Gujarati
    37. Haitian Creole
    38. Hebrew
    39. Hindi
    40. Hmong Daw
    41. Hungarian
    42. Icelandic
    43. Indonesian
    44. Inuinnaqtun
    45. Inuktitut
    46. Inuktitut (Latin)
    47. Irish
    48. Italian
    49. Japanese
    50. Kannada
    51. Kazakh
    52. Khmer
    53. Klingon
    54. Klingon (plqaD)
    55. Korean
    56. Kurdish (Central)
    57. Kurdish (Northern)
    58. Kyrgyz
    59. Lao
    60. Latvian
    61. Lithuanian
    62. Macedonian
    63. Malagasy
    64. Malay
    65. Malayalam
    66. Maltese
    67. Māori
    68. Marathi
    69. Mongolian (Cyrillic)
    70. Mongolian (Traditional)
    71. Myanmar
    72. Nepali
    73. Norwegian (Bokmål)
    74. Odia
    75. Pashto
    76. Persian
    77. Polish
    78. Portuguese (Brazil)
    79. Portuguese (Portugal)
    80. Punjabi
    81. Queretaro Otomi
    82. Romanian
    83. Russian
    84. Samoan
    85. Serbian (Cyrillic)
    86. Serbian (Latin)
    87. Slovak
    88. Slovenian
    89. Somali
    90. Spanish
    91. Swahili
    92. Swedish
    93. Tahitian
    94. Tamil
    95. Tatar
    96. Telugu
    97. Thai
    98. Tibetan
    99. Tigrinya
    100. Tongan
    101. Turkish
    102. Turkmen
    103. Ukrainian
    104. Upper Sorbian
    105. Urdu
    106. Uyghur
    107. Uzbek (Latin)
    108. Vietnamese
    109. Welsh
    110. Yucatec Maya
    111. Zulu

If you have more questions, need advice or want to see a live demo, feel free to reach out to us!

Martin Laplante

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