Create Communication Sites with a specific primary language using the User Interface

The new SharePoint Admin Centre updates have begun to rollout to targeted release tenants. This has enabled us to look at the new feature and provide a visual method for creating multi-lingual sites using the user interface.

Creating the site

This option only appears to be available for admins. So login into the SharePoint Admin centre, you will need SharePoint Admin Role permissions and go to the Preview Admin Centre.

In the “create site” button, you have new options to create a team or communication site as before, but with the ability to set the primary language of the site. Complete the form, and set the language to another, for example Welsh.

Among the new “create site” options in the preview admin centre, you will also find additional settings to include:

• Site Address - to select “/sites/” or “/teams/”, I would recommend using the same option across your multi-lingual sites to avoid confusion later.
• Time Zone - This can also be set in the “Settings” on the left hand navigation to change the tenant default.
• Site Owner - Typically this defaulted to you as the owner, great that you can specify someone else to have the site over to.

The site will be created as expected then you can navigate to the “Cog > Site Information > View all site settings > Language Settings” to confirm.

Where’s the Welsh?

The site may not show in the desired language e.g. Welsh. Typically, the user preferences are not specified in Delve, therefore it will default to the tenant default e.g. English. The is because all the alternative language options in the above screenshot, the options are all ticked. However, if you want to give it a go and see the site in Welsh, untick English, Click OK.

Where is the option for end users to create these sites?

For now, admins will need to create sites to perform this task. After looking at the announcement for this feature, the post does indicate that end-users will get this option:

“From the SharePoint home page, click Create site. As you name your site, select whether it’s public or private within your organization, etc. – you can now select a default language from 50 available languages. And this language can be different from the organization’s default language set at the organization level.”

This may not have rolled out to my tenant at the time of writing this post. We have now seen end-user options for selecting language on other targeted release tenants so its definitely coming soon.

This blog post is part of a series, check out this post “Series: Creating a Multi-lingual Intranet using Communication Sites” for more related content.

Note: In this post, I am using Welsh translated from Microsoft Bing/Translator Text API, I don’t speak Welsh so I rely on the accuracy of the translator services, if you find some Welsh words inaccurate or offensive, please let me know immediately by posting a comment or DM via Twitter and I will correct the content. Thank you.

Enjoy!