BluePrinting and translation
The design of your BluePrint hierarchy needs to reflect your translation strategy because the structure defined by your BluePrint drives translations and dictates the translation flow. This section explains the concept of BluePrinting and how the design of your BluePrint hierarchy needs to reflect your translation strategy.
BluePrinting
BluePrinting is a key concept in Content Manager. A BluePrint is a hierarchy of Publications created in the Content Manager which define parent and child relationships between Publications. A Parent Publication shares its content to its Child Publications. This sharing of content is known as BluePrinting and it allows you to reuse content by defining global content at a high level which is then shared down the BluePrint hierarchy. Shared content is automatically synchronized: when you make changes to local content in a Parent Publication, those changes are automatically shared to shared items in Child Publications.
The following image shows how content is shared from Parent to Child Publications:
- The Parent Publication shares all of its content (local items) to its Child Publications.
- The Child\Parent Publication contains the following content:
- Shared items—Component A is a read-only item inherited from the Parent Publication
- Localized items—Component B is a local copy of a shared item made editable and disconnected from the item in the Parent Publication
- Local items—Component C is a local item created in this Publication
- The Child Publication shares all its content from its Parent Publications
Localizing and translating content
Localization is the process of translating content into different languages. In a BluePrint, this involves removing the link to a parent item making the child item editable (translatable). BluePrinting allows you to localize content in a Child Publication that has been shared from a Parent Publication—content requiring translation is shared through the BluePrint and localized and translated, for example to use in a specific language Web site or to re-purpose to other channels such as an email campaign. Localized Web sites are therefore based on centrally provided global content and usually also include region-specific articles (local content) created in Child Publications combined into region-specific Pages.
Translations are always performed from a source language to a target language. In your Translation BluePrint—that is, the subset of Publications in the BluePrint which contain source content for translations or translated content—you therefore need to configure:
- Source Publications, Folders, Structure Groups, or Categories (in Parent Publications) to specify the organizational items that contain content in a source language
- Target Publications, Folders, Structure Groups, or Categories (in Child Publications) that can receive the translated content