Many companies operate globally, and even in their home market, companies often must appeal to customers who speak different languages. This diversity often requires that publishing sites be tailored for different cultures, markets, and geographic regions.

Overview

Maintaining a number of different versions, or "variations," of publishing sites or pages is difficult and time consuming because it can be difficult to coordinate the creation and updating of content between the variations.

To simplify this process, site owners can define a series of site variations and mark one as the primary, or source, variation. Changes to the source variation can be automatically or manually propagated to target variations. Updates to the source variation ensures that the changes are made in all other target variations. To enable integration with third-party translations services, this system is integrated with workflow and the import and export of content. When translation is completed, updates can be imported and sent for final approval through the workflow system.

Configure variation settings

To enable variation features, you must configure variation settings for your publishing sites or pages.

Note   You can have only one variation within a site collection. Multiple source variations are not supported.

1. Starting at the top-level site of a site collection, on the Site Actions menu , point to Site Settings, and then click Modify All Site Settings.
2. On the Site Settings page, under Site Collection Administration, click Variations.
3. In the Variation Home section, type the location in which the source and the target variations will be created.

   In some cases, it might not be the entire site collection that is being translated. It could just be the News section of the site that you want to define as a variation. Click Browse, and then navigate to the section of the site you want to set as the common location for all the variations, both source and targets.

4. In the Automatic Creation section, do one of the following:
   • If you want to automatically create a copy of all variations — for example, French, Spanish, and German translations of a Web site or page — click Automatically create site and page variations.
   • If you want the owner of a site or page to determine when a site or page is created, click Do not automatically create site and page variations.
5. In the Recreate Deleted Target Page section, determine what happens when a variation page is deleted and its variation source is updated. For example, if a variation source is in English and a target variation page, which is in Japanese, is deleted by the site owner of the Japanese site, determine whether a target Japanese page is re-created when the source page is republished.

   To determine whether a deleted target page is re-created, do one of the following:

   • If you don't want a new target page to be created when the source page is republished, click Do not recreate a new target page when the source page is republished.
   • To re-create a new target page when the source page is republished if the previous target page has been deleted, click Recreate a new target page when the source page is republished.
6. To send e-mail notification that new subsite or page of a target site is created, or when a target page is updated with revisions from the source variation, click the Send e-mail notification to owners when a new site or page is created or a page is updated by the Variation system.

   If a subsite is created, an e-mail message is sent to the owner of the parent subsite in which the new subsite is created. If a target page is updated as a result of a change made to its source variation, a message is sent to the owner of the site in which the page list exists.

7. In the Resources section, determine whether you want a new page variation to use the same resources as the source page or to use copies of these resources that are created in the location of the new page variation. Do one of the following:
   • To use existing resources, click Reference existing resources.
   • To copy the resources, click Copy resources.

     If the source variation page includes an image that is in a global site collection and is accessible to everyone, you may want to continue to use that image. However, if the source variation page references resources that are local to that site, you may want to either copy the resources so that they are local to the target site or continue to reference them from the source variation.

8. Click OK.