Issues with multiple languages in Navigation Manager

One of the great strengths of OpenText Management Server as a Content Management tool is its ability for workflow and multi-language internationalization. It comes with a tool called Translation Manager that allows you to push your English pages into another language variant within the same navigation structure, allowing your translation team to populate the associated content.

However, an issue that can sometimes arise through this application of the tool, is that only certain sections of the site may be sent for translation, leading to an incomplete navigation structure on the alternative language side; in this case, French.  

Navigation Manager, the part of the system that allows the flexibility to create dynamic site structures, relies on a method of traversing down a tree of pages in order to provide context to the page in question. If for some reason the navigation manager cannot traverse correctly to a specific page, it has no ability to provide a meaningful navigation to that page.

This can get even more complex when dealing with three languages, but for this example lets just stick to two.

As you can see there is no way for the system to provide a solid context of navigation on the french side of the structure. Solving this issue is not always a simple matter, as it can be challenging to locate the page (or pages) that only exist on one language. Thankfully, there is a method to solve this quite easily! It involves two steps:

1. Off the Home or Main page in your site, using the action menu use the Submit for Translation option and ensure you check the value for “All Following”. This will ensure that all pages in the tree exist in some context on the alternate language side.
2. Now that we have a large number of unreleased pages on the alternate language variant, we need to switch into that language variant. Using the “Pages Waiting for Release”  workflow action we can easily action all of the pages that are waiting to be released.

Voila! Now you can be sure that you don’t have any breaks in your chain on any side of any languages!