Dear Community and Umbraco staff,

We are a medium sized dutch internet agency, working with Umbraco since version 4.0. As developers we love Umbraco, but our customers do not always agree. The biggest complaints we receive are from customers who require user friendly multi language support.

Pitching and selling our projects, targeted for multi country orientated projects, sometimes leave us blushing with a client when he asks : “So, how you’re going to organize with Umbraco the translation of our website in 15 different languages?” Our answer then would be: “Well, we better offer you a different solution instead, with Umbraco it’s kinda difficult”.

For all Multilanguage projects we’ve done so far, we’ve always implemented the best practice that umbraco recommends. One content tree for every language. Huge disadvantages are:

-          Shared values, like images, links, classes, colors, inheritance, dependencies etc, are always to be administrated double.

-          No clear overview of which content is translated, and which not.

-          Willing to remove or add an item requires the same action to be repeated x times per language.

Of course, we’ve seen solutions of using one content tree instead and dividing text fields under different tabs. For two languages this may work, but imagine having 15 languages. The disadvantages for this solution are:

- Renderings cannot use native razor / get property methods for fields any more.

- Item url’s represent one language. Native calls to item url’s won’t work as expected.

- Unlogical administration of content tabs.

- Inefficient database / cache usage. Requesting an item for example in English, will as well retrieve all info from all other languages.

The best solution is out there though. But it requires a change in the core functionality of Umbraco, yet with a Package this is impossible.

I think the best solution is the one that, for example, Sitecore offers.

-          One single content tree.

-          Every item has it’s language “Version”. Switching between versions is done with a simple drop down option.

-          Document type fields can be marked as “Shared”, making it possible reusing item values. Those fields left unmarked as shared, represent values that are different for each language.

-          Native calls like .GetProperty<String>(“title”) will always retrieve the correct value for the Contextual Language.

-          Item url’s are natively generated multilingual.

I know this would be a huge change for Umbraco, but I really think that the current solution scares to many end-users and are forced to seek for other solutions then Umbraco, just because it’s multilingual support is so poor.

What do you guys think?

Mathijs