Lost in translation: Problems with the translation of SharePoint Columns

Mar 30, 2021 Translation
Teilen:

In SharePoint it’s possible to translate your custom columns. But you might not get the desired result in any case.

In my Site the default language is English. German is the only additional language I activated. “Overwrite translation” is set to off. As a user which display language is set to English I create a new site column: “RocketType” My created columns Now I switch to a User wich display language is set to German and translate the Column “RocketType” to “Raketentyp” just by changing the cloumn title.
Translated columns

I add the column to a new content type named “Rockets” and add this content type to my List “Aerospace”.
Everything works like expected:
List with English UI

List with German UI

Pretty straight forward and works really well. Unless you want to add a an additional column to your content type after you applied it to the list!

I created a new column named “Manufacturer” and translated it to “Hersteller” like I did with my first column.

In Figure 1 and Figure 2 you can already see that this is working well on column level and looks pretty well in my site content type.

But when I look at the list, this doesn’t work really well: List with English UI

List with German UI but English Manufacurer column

According to Microsoft Support this behavior is by design 😥.

Recap:
- It’s possible to translate columns, just see above how to do it.
- Translated columns will be added through a content type to the list.
- The translation works only for columns added to the content type before adding the content type to the list.

Possible workarounds:
- Manually rename the column within the list or rename it by script
- Don’t us a content type in this case
- Plan ahead 😁

Comments on twitter