SharePoint variations only work with publishing sites (and even then...). I just created a new collaboration site and activated the publishing features for it. My hope was that this would allow me to enable variations for my collaboration site, giving me a multi-lingual UI around the same content.

However, when I tried to enable variations, got an error message that the root site for the variations must be a publishing site. A collaboration site with the publishing infrastructure enabled doesn't cut it.

So:

1. Variations don't work with collaboration spaces ==> No multilingual collaboration spaces

2. Variations don't work well with publishing sites (see previous post) ==> No multilingual publishing sites

Well... that's disappointing!