Translation in AEM 6.4

Why translation?

Before getting started with translation in AEM 6.4, let’s try to understand why translation is important. In today’s global economy, companies of all sizes are establishing their operations in foreign markets. This type of global expansion can provide several advantages to companies, including greater opportunities for market growth and diversification. It also helps the companies to reduce costs and become more competitive.
However, creating or expanding a global web presence can be a complex process, but with good forethought and planning, AEM can simplify the efforts and support global business goals through the translation of company’s website into various languages which helps the company to reach the global audience and expand its market share.
The following are the key points which should be considered and well-planned before getting started with the translation –

• Governance
• Content management and user experience
• Translation technology
• Limit customization

Now let’s see each of them in detail.

Governance:

• Define content scope and ownership (global content vs. local content) – Determine if content will be centrally authored and “pushed” or “pulled” to regions/countries. Determine what content can be unlocked and altered in the geographies.
• Determine roles and responsibilities for translation, updates and rollouts – Determine who is responsible for initiating and managing translations.
• Plan, prototype and test the global structure and processes to ensure that they support the business and ensure that you have the required support from stakeholders in the geographies.

Content translation and user experience:

While designing the site structure, the best practice is to start with analyzing the existing site map and identify how the content is currently organized i.e. whether by product, region or language and then choose a structure that most suits the business. The following are the most common site structures –

• Language/Region
• Region/Language
• Language

The most commonly used site structure is Language/Region structure and is most supported by the OOTB translation integration framework.
Determine how content is distributed by regions and countries. Consider which countries share languages. It is recommended to create language masters, a layer of un-activated pages, where translated content can be reviewed and modified then pushed or pulled to a country site sharing that language.
There are two approaches to create language masters: using language copies and using MSM/live copies. Let’s discuss the creation of language masters in detail in the upcoming blogs.
The following image represents the Language/Region structure.

For the best user experience:
• Provide a global gateway to switch between the languages
• Use globe icon and avoid using flags to represent the languages
• Display language and region names in their respective region-specific language

Translation technology:

The following image represents the high-level architecture of the translation process.

The translation service provider (for example, Microsoft TSP) provides a connector to integrate with AEM. This translation connector will make use of the AEM translation integration framework to translate the content by using various translation workflows that are available by default.

Limit customization:

Adobe recommends us to limit customization as it’ll incur additional cost for development and also for any maintenance and support if needed.