Working with multilingual pages

SharePoint does support multilingual pages in communication sites and the page API has some handy methods to help with that.

Important

Multilingual pages only work on SharePoint Communication sites.

In the remainder of this article you'll see a lot of context use: in this case this is a PnPContext which was obtained via the PnPContextFactory as explained in the overview article and show below:

using (var context = await pnpContextFactory.CreateAsync("SiteToWorkWith"))
{
    // See next chapter on how to use the PnPContext for working with pages
}

Ensuring your site is correctly configured for multilingual pages

Before you use multilingual pages on a site you need to ensure the site is configured to support multilingual pages. There are 2 pre-requisites:

• The page needs to support the needed languages
• The multilingual page feature must have been activated

The easiest approach to ensuring a site is ready for multilingual is calling the EnsureMultilingualAsync method on the web object.

// Enable this site for multilingual pages
await context.Web.EnsureMultilingualAsync(new List<int>() { 1043, 1036 });

Above sample enables the site for Dutch (1043) and French (1036) and enables the multilingual page feature if it was not yet enabled.

Note

Paul Bullock's blog article on SharePoint Online language ids is a useful resource to pick the right id for the language you need.

Getting the available translations of an existing page

If you load a page on a site you do not always know which translated versions are available and in what state those translations are. Calling the GetPageTranslationsAsync method will get you a IPageTranslationStatusCollection object that contains a list of languages for which the page was not yet translated and a collection of IPageTranslationStatus objects giving you information about the existing page translations.

Note

A page needs to be saved before you can use the multilingual API.

// Enable this site for multilingual pages
await context.Web.EnsureMultilingualAsync(new List<int>() { 1043, 1036 });

// Create the page
var page = await context.Web.NewPageAsync();

// Save the page
await page.SaveAsync("PageA.aspx");

// Page should not yet have translations
var pageTranslations = await newPage.GetPageTranslationsAsync();

Create translations of a given page

If you've created a new page or when you've added a new language for your site you might want to also create the page translations for the new page or backfill the existing pages with a translation for the added language. Both of these tasks can be achieved by using the TranslatePagesAsync method. When you call this method without input it will automatically create page translations for each site language for which there was not yet a translated page. You can also pass in a PageTranslationOptions object specifying the languages to generate a translation for.

Note

A page needs to be saved before you can use the multilingual API.

// Enable this site for multilingual pages
await context.Web.EnsureMultilingualAsync(new List<int>() { 1043, 1036 });

// Create the page
var page = await context.Web.NewPageAsync();

// Save the page
await page.SaveAsync("PageA.aspx");

// Generate page translations: will create a page translations in the respective nl and fr folders
pageTranslations = await page.TranslatePagesAsync();