Translatable content deployment using variations

Today I have read about content deployment and the variations while I was looking for a solution to translate the content in a site automatically. After read some blogs and specially this white paper I have reached the conclusion that MOSS does not offer a complete solution.

The existence of the translatable columns can confuse you (I had very expectations about it). This attribute of a site column only indicates whether must be traduced or not. But who has to translate it? The white paper says literally:

"… They (editors) can export the content, provide the exported content to translators, let translators translate the content, and, finally, re-import the translated content onto the sites. During the export process on a variation target site, all pages are exported and packaged; this can add up to a lot of content. A feature called Translatable columns can help translators to identify what needs to be translated. …"

So, there is not any translation process involved in the publishing process. A possible workaround is to create a custom workflow activity that checks for the translatable columns in the item and traduce it using a web service (babelfish or worldlingo for example) and then associate it to the page libraries in the variation sites.

Another important issue of the content deployment using variations is the fact that a little change in a root variation page implies a total deploy of this page in the dependant variations as a draft version. The proposed solution is to add a workflow to delete this draft version using a Boolean field:

"… One way to address this scenario would be to create a custom Boolean column for the Page content type that can be used by the content editors on the variation source site to mark new versions as "corrections" when necessary. Then, you could create a custom workflow and deploy it on only the target sites. This workflow would need to check every change to read the custom column's value: if the value were True, the workflow would simply delete the new version created by the variation process on the target site. If the value were False, the workflow would preserve the new page so content editors could translate it. ..."

This workaround could be complementary to the previous workaround and we would have a "complete" solution to the translatable content deployment using variations.

Please, feel free to add comments in order to get a "better solution".

Related Liks:
http://sjoere.blogspot.com/2007_11_01_archive.html