How are multilingual sites implemented?

Here are some things to keep in mind when thinking about SharePoint multilingual capabilities:

A lot of organizations, for example, state that they support “English only” within their SharePoint environments but have custom site collections pop-up at times with language packs or custom deployments in other languages to support specific locations.

The new Multiple Language Interface (MLI) in essence tells a specific site's interface to be available and utilize a specific language pack. This feature changes elements such as titles, navigation elements, and menus, but any embedded “custom text” or content does not automatically change to the specified language.You can think of this content as being in “a container of its own” and outside of the feature set, so it is important to keep this in mind in your planning.

Variations is the feature that makes multilingual sites possible and is available for publishing sites; it creates a duplicate copy of the site and updates it into the specified variation language when it is published and translated.

You will need to install at least a few core language packs for the languages your organization wishes to support. There are over 40 available language packs for SharePoint 2013, as listed in the table below.

Although you may not think you will need to utilize other language packs, there may be documents that are emailed or uploaded to SharePoint from partners, clients, or team members that have other languages embedded in them or were possibly created from a template set in another language and this can cause search to not properly return search results for this content.