Variations in SharePoint allow site administrators to create multiple versions of the same site in various languages. This provides a simple yet powerful tool for creating multilingual websites. In a site collection with variations, a source variation site (or label) is configured as the primary location for content to be authored. For each variation (or language), a target site (or label) is created that receives its content from the source site.
In this recipe, we will cover the basic settings for site collection variations that we will use when we create our source and target labels in the Creating the primary language variation label and Creating the secondary language variation labels recipes.