Translate Documents in SharePoint with AI (Multilingual Made Easy!)

Collaborating with teams across different languages just got easier! In this episode of the Ultimate SharePoint Content AI Series, we show you how to translate Word, PowerPoint, and PDF files right inside SharePoint—powered by AI.

See how it handles French, Dutch, and Turkish—and how to improve accuracy with a custom glossary file.
Learn how to auto-translate new files using SharePoint Rules.
And find out how the new translation tracking pane keeps you in the loop.

Whether you’re from Quebec or Belgium—or anywhere else—this tool is a game changer for multilingual collaboration!

Watch my 100+ courses on Pluralsight

Video SummarySharePoint now lets you translate documents into multiple languages with just a few clicks—Word, PDF, PowerPoint, even emails are supported, and it’s surprisingly fast and affordable.You can use glossary files to control how specific terms are translated. Just make sure the terms match the exact casing in your documents—it’s case sensitive!SharePoint’s new rule engine lets you automate translations. For example, every new file added to a library can be instantly translated into French (or any language you choose), using your glossary if needed.There are a few limitations: files must be under 40MB, encrypted or password-protected files won’t work, and you can’t translate entire folders or SharePoint pages (yet!).Translation costs $15 per 1 million characters—including spaces and punctuation. It’s a great accelerator for multilingual projects, but always double-check the output, especially for legal or sensitive content.

For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!

Transcript

Whether you’re based in North America, Europe, or anywhere across the world, you’re probably collaborating with people who speak different languages. And SharePoint multilingual has traditionally been quite a challenge. It wasn’t always the easiest story to tell. But what if I told you right now that with one single click, you can translate documents in SharePoint from English to French, English to German, German to English, and hundreds of different languages—and the cost is quite cheap?

Welcome back, everyone, to the Ultimate SharePoint Content AI Series. This is episode 15. We’re getting towards the end, and in this episode, I’m joined by my good friend Gokan Ozcifci. I cannot do a translation video without Gokan because, you know, I speak three languages—well, three and a half—and I think I’m pretty cool. But then you come in and speak like six languages fluently. Four fluently, really fluently. Five with some words and some sentences—like, I can order food, talk to the cab, everything.

Gokan: Yeah, no, he speaks more than four. Don’t listen to him.

Vlad: And Gokan, how many multilingual SharePoint projects have you had?

Gokan: A lot of those projects, especially in Belgium, where we speak like three languages, including English. It’s only about bilingual, multilingual projects.

Vlad: And I’m from Quebec, where French and English are in every single project. So before we get started, there are two things you need to have set up. First, you need to have billing for pay-as-you-go enabled. Second, you need to have document translation turned on—either on the site you’re working on or across all SharePoint sites inside your tenant. Don’t worry if you don’t know how to do it or haven’t done it yet. We have a dedicated video that covers it, linked in the description below. After this video, you can go check it out.

This video shouldn’t be too long. We’ll go directly to the point and have lots of fun demos. Now, let me put the supported file types here on the screen. As you can see, quite a few are supported—from email messages to PowerPoint, Word, PDF, text, and even HTML. I want to point out that both the new Word document format (.docx) and the old one (.doc from Word 2003) will work. However, the translated document will be in the new version. Honestly, you should just create the new version anyway.

Should we do a demo, Gokan?

Gokan: Let’s do a demo.

Vlad: We’ll get back to the slides after. So here I have a document library—just a basic one. I’ve added some documents to it. We’re on conference Wi-Fi, so I wanted to make sure everything was preloaded so you don’t have to wait for uploads. I have this document in English called “M365 Copilot Consulting.” I probably just want to invoice Gokan for some more money here. I also have a smaller one titled “Understanding Cloud Computing.” It’s a lot smaller and just uses some technical terms I wanted to talk about.

Let’s say I need this document in French. I can click the three dots, select “Translate,” and with only a few clicks, I can choose the languages—Dutch, Turkish, and French. Should I put Dutch here and Turkish for you, Gokan?

Gokan: I can only help with the first one. I cannot help with the other two.

Vlad: We can also add a glossary file, but I’ll talk more about that in just a few seconds. Right now, let’s just translate this document to those three languages. Click “Translate,” and it will take a Microsoft minute—but usually it’s faster. It can take anywhere from 30 seconds to 5–10 minutes. Let me refresh for good luck. Okay, it’s not done yet.

Meanwhile, let’s cover some limitations. The maximum file size for documents is 40MB. This is the major limitation when I present this to customers—they often have documents larger than 40MB. It’s rather small for enterprises. The problem is usually images in PDFs and PowerPoint files make them large, even if there’s not much text. I wish they made it bigger.

Encrypted files are not translated. Password-protected files are not translated either. That would’ve been cool—remember all the tricks in school when teachers locked files? You cannot use translation to decrypt or remove password protection. Text on images within documents is not translated. SharePoint site pages are not supported at this time. Microsoft, please—love pages! Pages are also a source of content.

Also, you have to do it at the document level. You can select multiple documents, but you cannot select a folder and translate everything inside it at once. Let’s see if it’s done now. Quick refresh. Were we lucky, Gokan?

Gokan: Not yet.

Vlad: We still have to wait a second. So we’re going to pause the video for you, and in just one second, all our documents will be ready. And yeah—we didn’t have to cut the video. It’s just there. Wow. It’s live demo timing.

Let me go to the French one since we can both understand it. I’ll put the English one up for comparison. Sorry if English and French aren’t your languages—those are just the ones Gokan and I both understand. You’ll have to trust us that it’s right.

Gokan, let’s see. “Cloud computing has revolutionized the way businesses operate by providing scalable and flexible IT resources over the internet.” Cloud computing revolution—please. Virtual machines, load balancer, firewall, encryption, and latency balance.

Gokan: It’s pretty decent, to be honest. It just couldn’t translate a few words, but it’s pretty decent.

Vlad: You know what I realized? Let me open the Dutch one so you can tell me what you think. Again, I’ll just have to trust you on this. Let me…

Oh, this is not good. This is bad. Sorry for zooming in and out. I’ll try the Turkish one as the last one. Go ahead—this one, I really cannot help you on.

Yeah. Oh, by the way, you see the summary? We have the Copilot summary here in English. It’s able to translate the other way as well in Copilot. The summary at the top has nothing to do with Content AI—that’s a Copilot functionality. But I still found it interesting.

Now, Gokan, let me go back to the French one. You have a lot of customers in France, right?

Gokan: We wouldn’t be using those English words in a French text. People in France use a lot more English words than we do in Quebec. In Quebec, we’re really…

Vlad: How do you say “cloud computing” in French?

Gokan: “Le nuage.”

Vlad: No, maybe in France. In Quebec, we call it “infonuagique.”

Gokan: Whoa.

Vlad: Right. So how do I fix it? Remember when I mentioned the glossary files? Let me rename this document to “Understanding Cloud Computing New,” and I’ll also add “Gokan is the best IT pro ever.”

What you can do to make document translation work better is use a glossary file. I have a file here called “Glossary.” It’s a CSV file, and you need one for every language. For example, if “load balancer” didn’t translate, I want to tell it what to use. If it’s “Gokan,” I want it to be “Gokan” (your nickname in the community). For “cloud computing,” I want it to be “infonuagique.” For your French clients, you might use “le nuage,” but for me in Quebec, it’s “infonuagique.”

Back in the document library, I’ll go to “Translate,” choose French (Canada this time), and select my glossary file. It’s really important—don’t pick the first “French” you see. Pick the actual one you want. No matter what language you choose, it’ll never translate “Gokan” to “Gokan” unless you tell it.

I’ll choose my glossary file now. What I’m telling SharePoint is: translate this document, but look at all the special terms I’ve defined. Click “Translate.” It’ll take a few seconds again. Let’s talk about custom glossaries.

Most automatic translation services—SharePoint, Google Translate, AI tools—don’t handle niche terms well. A glossary instructs the engine on specific terms you care about and how to translate them. You need to give it as a CSV file, which is honestly the easiest format. You can also use TSV or tab-delimited files.

Gokan: I have to disagree. It could be a SharePoint list somewhere in your site.

Vlad: That would be great, but right now it has to be one of those files. The file needs to be in the same library as the documents you’re translating. It can be in a different folder, like I did here, but it must be in the same library.

When using glossary files, you can only translate to one language at a time. You can’t do up to 10 like I did in the previous demo. Something else I want to show you—if you go to “Automate,” then “Rules,” and create a rule, the new SharePoint rule engine is like super easy workflows. I can set it so that when a new file is added, it always creates a translated copy in French (Canada). You can also select the glossary.

So now, every file added to this library will automatically be translated. You don’t have to do it manually. But if I also add Dutch, the glossary gets grayed out—because as soon as you use a glossary, it’s only one language at a time. I wish I could just have one glossary with all the terms and have it be smart enough. There’s so much opportunity for this to get better.

Anyway, I just wanted to share the rule engine with you. The new translation got added—“Understanding Cloud Computing New” in French. It didn’t like “cloud computing” here. This one it did. I wonder if I copied and pasted badly. There we go—“Gokan est le meilleur.”

It worked. “Cloud computing” here didn’t work. You have to be careful when you create the glossary. I wonder if it’s case sensitive. I’m curious. I’ll do the test after this.

Hey there, this is Vlad from the future. Sorry to interrupt your video, but I just finished the test we talked about with Gokan. I wanted to show you the result. I changed “cloud computing” to match the exact capitalization in the Word document. I did two tests—one with a capital “C,” one with lowercase. I re-translated it, and it worked. It said “infonuagique,” exactly what I wanted.

So we have our answer—it is case sensitive. Just something to be careful with. I also tested it in a sentence, and even with a spelling mistake, it worked. But for title casing, “cloud computing” wasn’t translated using my glossary. So make sure your glossary terms match the case exactly.

While I have your attention, I also want to talk about something fresh off the press. Microsoft added a processing status pane. You know how Gokan and I kept refreshing to see if it was done? Now, Microsoft will show a translation activity pane. You’ll be able to see the history for the last 60 days of your translations, including ones in progress. It’s no longer a black box. You can see everything—what worked, what failed, and what’s still processing.

Now let’s talk about money. Money runs the world, right? It’s important. The cost is $15 per 1 million characters you translate. It’s tough to estimate by the number of documents because every document is different. But remember—your character count includes letters, Unicode code points, punctuation, and white spaces.

Honestly, punctuation and white spaces being counted is… come on, Microsoft. It’s like in school when you had to reach a certain number of lines or spaces.

Gokan: Yeah, exactly. It just shows more characters for the teacher. That’s how they did billing for it.

Vlad: But again, who are we to argue against Microsoft? All we can do is inform you how it works. So yes, $15 for 1 million characters.

This is it for this video. Gokan, in your experience, are people using this? Is it reliable, or is it just a starting point and then people do manual changes?

Gokan: It’s an accelerator. I’m not going to call it a starting point because the translation is very good. We’ve tried it with PDF files, with images—it keeps the same layout and design. It’s an accelerator. We always double-check, read to make sure things are good. Don’t use it for legal documents, okay? We’re not responsible if you do that. But it’s phenomenal. It’s a great accelerator to translate any data to any language you want. Highly recommend it.

Vlad: Awesome. Well, that’s it for this video on document translation, everyone. I hope you enjoyed it. If you did, like the video, subscribe to the channel, and check out the other videos in the series. The next one will appear on your screen right now. Thank you again so much for watching.