Allow Users to Consume Content in Multiple Languages
Use the Google Translate Web-Part for Fast (but Sometimes Low Quality) Translation
This is the simplest means of providing content to visitors in multiple languages but can yield low-quality translations.
You can add the Google Translate web-part to any page. It will leverage Google's translation algorithm to translate all HTML content on the page into whatever language the user has selected from 20+ languages in the Google Translate drop-down menu.
This is great for "quick and dirty" translation, but do not be surprised if the translation lacks quality. Although it is one of the best free translation engines on web, Google Translate's ability to provide ad hoc translations is still limited because there is no human brain available to consider the context of the words being translated.
As long as you aren't sharing a legal document or other content for which there is zero room for error, this is not a bad component to include for multilingual users.
Create "Mirror" Sites for Different Languages
This is the more complex and laborious means of providing content to visitors in multiple languages but will provide a high-quality multilingual experience.
In the content management system (CMS) you can only use one language per site. This means that if you want to personally translate an entire site into multiple languages, you will need one site per language to organize language specific content.
Our support for multiple sites in a singe installation allows the same users and roles across sites. By using the same or similar skins in each site a visually seamless experience can be created between the sites by linking them together with flags or text links indicating the language.
Handling multilingual sites in this manner means that if if traffic for one of your supported languages becomes much higher than the traffic for other languages, we at SchoolFront can split the sites onto different servers providing better performance for you and your visitors if necessary.
If you are interested in implementing one or more mirror sites for specific languages, please contact the SchoolFront Support Team for configuration assistance.