Using multilingual information within CMS is something which is more and more important for users world wide. During the OSCMS summit 2007 I did a session presenting the basic issues related to the topic. During the presentation we entered a very informative discussion about the solutions within the other CMS solutions.

Find attached ( Manage multilingual content within a CMS) the presentation and in the article I note some points of the discussion we had.

Discussion about "default / standard" language

One issue we discussed is the idea of having a "default" language for the organizational steps within your site. Some people addressed the fact that it is not really usable to use such a "standard" language. E.g. in an environment of an organization such as the UN or the EU they are understanding all languages equally important. Talking about a "default" language is somehow a problem at this point.

All agreed that there is some kind of "master" instance of a new content which basically then leads to translations then. What language this "master" copy has isn't that important but it needs to be tagged somehow.

Translations process / workflow

A second important topic we raised is the  translation process. Some attending people discussed about the different processes and notifications which are required when you work with different instances of contents. One developer from Alfresco said that within the EU project one of the important things was that they need to have different versions based on the languages. But depending on the kind of a change it could happen that a notification was send even to the master. The example he did was:

• If the translation was changed because of a mistakes in the translation it would only create a new version there
• If the translation was changed because of a new information a notification was send to all other instances of this text