The PointFire Blog - The PointFire Blog for Multilingual SharePoint , PointFire TipsThe PointFire Blog - The PointFire Blog for Multilingual SharePoint , PointFire Tipshttps://blog.icefire.ca/blogs/pointfire-tipsWed, 16 Jul 2025 11:17:21 -0700http://zoho.com/sites/<![CDATA[SharePoint supports 50 languages but PointFire lets you translate to 111 language, here's how.]]>https://blog.icefire.ca/blogs/post/translate-sharepoint-to-111-languages

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!

]]>Mon, 16 May 2022 19:22:04 -0400<![CDATA[New languages in PointFire Translator]]>https://blog.icefire.ca/blogs/post/a-few-new-languages

Because of recent changes to the Azure Translator Text API, a few new languages in the Western Iranian language group are being added to PointFire Translator.

Two versions of Kurdish are being introduced, Kurdish (Central), language code "ku", also called Sorani, and Kurdish (Northern), language code "kmr", also called Kurmanji.

In addition, two languages of Afghanistan are being added. Dari (prs) and Pashto (ps).  PointFire Translator had already supported Dari and Persian, and Dari is also supported by PointFire 365 and SharePoint. However, we had been using the same language code and translation engine for both of them, because they are so similar. Now Dari will use "prs" and Persian will use "fa" for Farsi, another name for the same language.
]]>Fri, 21 Aug 2020 16:08:00 -0400<![CDATA[SharePoints New Multilingual Publishing Feature and How PointFire Translator Integrates With It]]>https://blog.icefire.ca/blogs/post/sharepoint-s-new-multilingual-publishing-feature-and-how-pointfire-integrates-with-it

The initial documentation for Microsoft’s new multilingual pages functionality for modern pages is now available online.  You can find it here.

According to the recent announcement, "this new feature enables the publishing and consumption of pages and news in multiple languages in a modern SharePoint communication site. This is an opt-in feature. Site owners must take action to enable this experience.... We will be gradually rolling out this feature to Targeted Release (entire organization) customers by the end of March 2020. The roll out will be completed for all customers, by the end of May 2020."

When it is activated, site owners will be able to select the languages to which they want modern pages to be translated, and the persons who should be notified when a translation is requested.

When a modern page has been created, a translation can be requested.  On the top bar of the page, select the Translation button.

This brings up a translation pane on the right of the page.  To create a page for translation in all the languages configured for your site, select "Create for all languages". Otherwise, you can select the individual languages you want by clicking "Create".

If you are one of the people named as a translator for that language, you will get an email that looks like this:

The out-of-the-box experience when clicking on the “Start translating” button is to bring you to a copy of the original page in the original language, saved in a language-specific folder of the Page library.  You can start translating this copy of the page, replacing the text in the title and in the various webparts with text in the desired language, provided that you have the required permissions.

This is where PointFire Translator integration comes in.  SharePoint's new out-of-the-box feature does not include machine translation.  If you have version 2.0 of PointFire Tranlator and someone has set up the automation or the scheduling features of PointFire Translator Server, then when you click on “Start translating” in your email you will see not the page in the original language for you to translate, but a freshly translated page for you to check, modify if required, and publish.  It’s that simple.  PointFire Translator will have translated the page, its title, the text within text and hero webparts, webpart titles, translatable text metadata, etc.

If notification was not set up in the OOTB feature, or if you have not enabled the automation or the scheduling features of PointFire Translator, then you will have to initiate the translation manually.  Go to the appropriate Pages library, then pick the folder with the language code corresponding to the desired language.

For those who have used PointFire products before, SharePoint is now using the same language codes that PointFire had been using.  Then within the folder, select the page that you want to translate, and either select “PointFire Translator” in the item menu or click on the item to activate the checkmark in the circle to the left of the item and click on the the “PointFire Translator” button.

Besides the ability to translate the modern pages created by this SharePoint OOTB feature, you can still get the other benefits of PointFire Translator, including the ability to translate classic pages, to translate documents in Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF format, and to translate list items, as well as the ability to translate entire libraries and lists at once rather than single items or wildcard matches.

More detailed information will be posted here when Microsoft makes it public.

]]>Sun, 08 Mar 2020 17:03:00 -0400<![CDATA[Machine Translation Service, Variations are on the way out]]>https://blog.icefire.ca/blogs/post/machine-translation-service-variations-are-on-the-way-out
Update for Machine Translation Services from SharePoint Online

MC143381
Plan For Change
Published On : 28 June 2018

We will be removing the user interface entry point for Machine Translation Services from SharePoint Online, beginning September 2018.

How does this affect me?


With this change, your organization will no longer be able to perform manual, on demand translation service activities in SharePoint Online. This change will affect your user's ability to create new variation labels in order to schedule translation activities or workflows. The update will not affect your user's ability to leverage Multilingual User Interface (MUI) capabilities in SharePoint Online or its related APIs. Also, it will not impact any previously created variation labels or the ability to schedule translation activities or workflows based on previously created variation labels. After this change is made, your users will not be able to create new variation labels.


This sounds the death knell for machine translation of Variations, and probably Variations itself.  Already, modern sites like Communication sites and Team sites cannot use Variations, and the Machine Translation API does not work on modern pages.  When this announcement says "your users will not be able to create new variation labels", it is referring to classic sites.


The only remaining alternative for multilingual sites in SharePoint Online will be to use PointFire 365 and PointFire Power Translator, which work on modern sites and pages, including modern communication sites, because they don't rely on Variations or the Machine Translation Service.

The announcement also says "Instead of using on-demand, manual translation services, we recommend your organization use Bing translation API’s."

Why don't you try that?  The rest of us will wait here.  And by the way it's now called the Microsoft Translator Text API.  You're back!  All sorts of error messages?  Come back when you've done all the buffering, parsing, and escaping to have it run error-free.  Back again?  And hardly anything translated?  Yes, most of the text on the page isn't in the aspx file in translatable form.  You need to use PointFire Power Translator, no other Microsoft or third party tool does it.

Update: see this discussion about what this announcement meant about "your users will not be able to create new variation labels." https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint/SharePoint-Online-Variations-alternative/td-p/212239
]]>Sat, 30 Jun 2018 08:07:00 -0400<![CDATA[Is there Persian (Farsi) language support for SharePoint?]]>https://blog.icefire.ca/blogs/post/is-there-persian-farsi-language-support-for-sharepoint

SharePoint sometimes has separate language packs for several variants of closely related languages, like Brazilian and European Portuguese, or several varieties in the Serbo-Croatian family of languages.  In other cases, you have to live with a different variant of your language, so for instance people in the UK must use the American flavour of English with American spelling and vocabulary, and Flemish-speaking Belgians must use Dutch, with all its differences in vocabulary.

For Persian, the language spoken in Iran, there is no direct support.  However in SharePoint 2013 and 2016 and in SharePoint Online, you do have the option of selecting Dari.  Dari is a language of Afghanistan, the native language of about 20% of the population.  It is also known as Dari Persian, Afghan Persian, and simply Farsi.  Although the spoken version sounds quite different from Iranian Persian spoken in Tehran, the written language is nearly the same.  Download the SharePoint Dari Language Pack and use it instead of Persian.


For languages where SharePoint supports a slightly different version of the language that you want, PointFire gives you the option in a lot of cases to override specific text from SharePoint's language packs and use your different text instead.
]]>Mon, 30 Apr 2018 14:05:00 -0400<![CDATA[Why Do We Need PointFire for Multilingual Collaboration in SharePoint? Part I]]>https://blog.icefire.ca/blogs/post/why-do-we-need-pointfire-for-multilingual-collaboration-in-sharepoint-part-i
While SharePoint does provide certain multilingual features, we find that our clients require a little more flexibility and responsiveness in the multilingual user interface and content delivery as well as a simplified method to manage multilingual content and documents. PointFire provides this solution as well as providing many other useful tools for customizing the look and behavior of your SharePoint sites.
 

Here is Part I of this series that will cover the reasons you need PointFire in a multilingual SharePoint environment.

Translation Control

If you look at the list of elements that the SharePoint MUI doesn't support, PointFire supports all of the rest, with very few exceptions (some aspects of Silverlight and InfoPath, for which we provide workarounds). You can see a few specific scenarios in the first few pages of the PointFire 2010 User GuideGuide http://community.icefire.ca/index.php?/Knowledgebase/Article/View/97/9/pointfire-2010-user-guide
 
First and foremost: content.  PointFire does not only handle the "chrome" but user-generated content as well.  It reaches inside html pages and inside lists and libraries to translate what you want it to translate.  It intercepts ajax calls, RSS feeds, and some Javascript to translate as appropriate.  Here is a partial list of elements that PointFire does and the SharePoint MUI doesn't
 

webpart titles and properties

custom webparts

templates that MUI doesn't support, such as blogs and workspaces

custom properties

custom additions to various menus & ribbons

search refiners

permission types

group names

multi-valued columns values

calculated text fields

ajax

embedded xml

embedded javascript

alert & popup messages

dialogue boxes

custom new/edit/ etc forms

questionnaires

views

folder names

    In addition, it does some translations with less effort than the MUI in many cases.  For instance, if you add a custom list and put it in the quick-launch menu, then provide the translation of the list name, the translated list name will not appear in the menu unless you edit it separately.  With PointFire, you only have to add the translation in one place.   In fact, if the same list name is used elsewhere in a different site, PointFire can inherit that translation from another site.
     

    Of course, translation is only one of the 4 localization techniques that PointFire makes available.  There are much more powerful filtering techniques that allow you to tag content in lists, libraries, pages, and webparts as being in one language or the other, allowing SharePoint to assemble the page in the user's language while using the same URL.

    ]]>    Sun, 14 Jul 2013 22:59:00 -0400