Are there any issues with having multiple language versions of templates and template fields?

Question

We have a multilingual website based on Sitecore 8.1 rev. 151207 (8.1 Update-1) and Glass Mapper. It has four languages: English, Danish, Swedish and German.

Some of the developers are native English speakers, and some are native German speakers. "Naturally", they used their respective Sitecore UI languages in the content editor when creating and editing templates. So we ended up with approximately 100 item templates, with some of them having only an English version, some only German, and some both. The same goes for template fields—actually, some templates have most fields with two language versions, a couple fields in only English or German.

This is a messy situation, and I believe that mid-term we should spend time on making all templates English-only. But in the meanwhile, I would like to know whether or not this could become an issue short-term. Could this result in errors in some situations? Could it affect language fallback functionality? How much should we prioritize fixing this?

Answer 1

Messy; sure. But it should be without consequence. Templates and fields are language agnostic; even if the "field items" themselves get created with a language version. All fields on a field template are either [Shared] or [Unversioned].

The only exception to this that I'm aware of, is Enable versioned field level fallback; used in the setup and use of Field Level fallbacks. If you're using that feature, you need to be mindful of its setting on the various language versions you have.

Also - but I believe you realise this already - be aware of your __Standard Values item and versions - for this, it matters what language versions you have created. Likely some Sitecore Powershell Extentions scripting could help clean that up a bit.

So in summary. If you're not using Field Level Fallback; don't worry too much about this. 'd be nice to clean up, but it should not have any practical impact on your solution - just be careful of Single Language Publishes. They might just go ignore your item if you're publishing only "en" but a field is defined with a "de" language version. If I remember it right; the PublishEmptyItems setting could influence this behaviour.