Prepare multilingual Product Attributes using googletranslate()

Recently I was requested to support a customer for the setup of product attributes. As this is a very common task and not as complicated I told him:

• keep all attributes unique
• setup attribute types, use different data types as needed, use enumerations for selection list, define ranges where needed, translate to the languages you need
• setup attributes, assign the according attribute types, set default values, translate to the languages you need

So we were fine about the process, then customer told me he has to define about few hundret values at the enumeration lists for different attributes in multiple languages, how should this be handled?

So we researched the entiy for enumeration list, which is “Product attribute enumeration types” and for translations of the enumeration list the entity is “Product attribute enumeration type translations”.

So at this point we came to the translation feature I hoped to find inside Microsft Excel. But disappointingly I only found the translation servcie to translate cells interactive, although I had hoped to find a formula to translate from one language to another. Fortunately we found this formula in Google Spreadsheets which I had never used before as I’m a Excel enthusiast.

So we liked to process the master data in straight forward process to create a reproducible template to import all attribute type enumeration values for e,g, here with Colors in multiple languages.

First we setup the product attribute type for Colors (which should not be a product dimension).

Then we prepared the “Product attribute enumeration types” entity with just three columns:

After that we had to switch to Google Spreadsheets to use googeltranslate() Function to prepare the translation entity based on the enumeration values.

As Google Speadsheets can save files as csv as well as Excel format it was easy to prepare for DMF import. At this point we had just two tables with seven columns to import. After the import of this small entities we can start using multilingual attributes.

For multilingual setup of master data Google Spreadsheets with GoogleTranslate() function is an essential tool to prepare the master data in dynamic and consistent way without using paste and copy for translations.

May be in the future we can access the similar function “mstranslate()” inside beloved Excel as cognitive services could do this as well.

The “Product attribute enumeration types” entity is just for option list of texts which we covered here for translaion. If you need to import also “integer lists” for attribute types this is done by using the “Product attribute integer enumeration types”. For all other data types the “Product attribute value types” entity can be used, but the structure of this entity is different as you need to define the data type and depending of the data type use different columns.

This post was first released in 05-2021 on http://dynamics3654operations.de, further information and more details on Microsoft Docs.