While SharePoint does provide certain multilingual features, we find that our clients require a little more flexibility and responsiveness in the multilingual user interface and content delivery as well as a simplified method to manage multilingual content and documents. PointFire provides this solution as well as providing many other useful tools for customizing the look and behavior of your SharePoint sites.
SharePoint variations require the creation of separate sites and the automatic provisioning of alternate variations of your content, which need to be translated and then maintained by a trained staff on the use of those variations. PointFire enables your users to work on one site in multiple languages and store your documents/items in the same lists but giving you the power to filter that content based on language. Using variations requires only a rudimentary understanding of SharePoint lists and libraries, whereas SharePoint variations requires much more advanced training.
Users can easily manage multilingual HTML elements, text and images using the PoitnFire SDK, which is essentially server tags that allow you to indicate a segment of HTML code is meant for a specific language. PointFire will filter those HTML segments based on language on the fly. It is a very simple solution and requires very little effort to implement.
