Case Study: The Council of the European Union achieves fast, efficient 24-language publishing with Umbraco

24 languages, 800 translators. How to make content editing fast and efficient

The Council of European Union, one of the EU’s governing bodies, faced an outdated CMS that slowed publishing, made rich content assembly difficult, and fragmented translation workflows across 24 official languages handled by roughly 800 translators. A team of 6 developers and 3 designers selected Umbraco CMS to rebuild the public site and solve performance, editorial flexibility, multilingual translation, and search challenges.

Using Umbraco, the team implemented a flexible grid (enhanced with Doc Type Grid Editor), a customized Vorto-based multilingual workflow with XLIFF import/export for translators, ElasticSearch for full-text search and Varnish caching to absorb traffic peaks. Launched after about 10–11 months, the site delivered immediate publishing, faster translation (one file per page), and reliable performance under heavy load; within two months editors reported quicker content creation and the Council achieved more accurate, reusable and timely content across all 24 languages thanks to Umbraco.

The Council of European Union

Dirk De Grave

Freelance Umbraco Expert