WordPress is a content management system (CMS) used by thousands of websites worldwide. It enables you to build a website in any language you want.
However, WordPress does not have the potential to create built-in multilingual websites. Fortunately, several popular WordPress translation plugins make adding multilingual material to your web a breeze. It takes a lot of effort to create high-quality content, so doesn’t it make sense for the content to reach as many people as possible?
Even though English is the most commonly used language globally, only about 25% of the Internet’s 4.1 billion users speak or write it. That means the remaining 75% communicate in various languages, including Chinese, Spanish, Arabic, German, and others. The Internet consumption numbers allow for an even more fascinating read. Even though only 25.4% of Internet users speak English, W3Techs discovered that more than half of the content online is written in English — 54% to be precise. This language barrier presents an opening for savvy multilingual webmasters.
You’ll need to post multilingual content if you want to reach a genuinely global web audience. Installing a multilingual plugin — with several excellent choices — is the perfect way to convert a WordPress-powered website into several languages.
Choosing a Translation Plugin
Multilingual plugins are usually divided into two categories:
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Translate automatically
These plugins use online translation services to translate the content into several languages with a single click. However, no automatic language service has completely grasped the complexities of any popular language as the translations aren’t always accurate (though they’re much better than they were previously). WordPress translation plugins that use online translation services to translate the material are one of the options that can be used here. Although these plugins do not force you to write content in several languages, the translation quality is not as good as it should be.
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Self-translate
You must translate the text yourself for these plugins (or hire someone else to do the translations). You write your content in your chosen language, then rewrite it in various other languages that visitors can choose from. It takes longer than the two methods, but it delivers the highest-quality translations by far.
Some tools allow you to do both, with the option to start by automatically translating your site and then fine-tune it as needed. You can manually apply multilingual content to your website using the multilingual plugins. The biggest advantage of using these plugins is that the accuracy of your translations would be much superior to that of any machine-generated online translation application.
Here in this post, we’ll show you the top ten WordPress translation plugins for creating multilingual websites.
Best WordPress Multilingual Plugins
1. TranslatePress
TranslatePress is a full-featured multilingual WordPress plugin that allows you to translate any part of your blog. The key feature of this plugin is that it helps you to read straight from the front end.
During the conversion, you can quickly swap languages, and the live preview will update immediately. Another advantage of this method is that it allows you to translate content, themes, widgets, and even meta-data without having to change the guide.
Manual translations are a breeze with TranslatePress. You can translate yourself or hand over the task to any other user, who can translate the content without access to the admin panel.
If manual translations seem to be too time-consuming, you can use Google Translate to perform machine translations. This method combines AI-assisted translations with manual corrections.
The plugin generates SEO-friendly URLs for all languages, boosting your local SEO rankings.
2. WPML- The WordPress Multilingual Plugin
WPML is one of the most widely used multilingual WordPress plugins. It includes a robust translation management framework that lets you translate content, themes, plugins, and more.
Multilingual blog and Multilingual CMS license plans are available for WPML. For eCommerce, page builder support, custom fields, managing translation teams, and a few other functions, you’ll need the multilingual CMS plan.
It has a user-friendly guide for adding translations and managing multilingual content to the website. All post styles, taxonomies, custom fields, and strings created by WordPress themes and plugins are supported by WPML.
However, the translations are the most critical aspect of any multilingual plugin, and WPML falls under both the auto-translate and self-translate categories.
You have two options for auto-translating the site:
- WPML can sync with ICanLocalize and Cloudwords services. It sends your material to your favorite translation tool, and it’s ready to go when it returns.
- You will use WPML’s new Advanced Translations Editor to use Microsoft Azure’s Machine Translation engine to automatically translate individual pieces of text.
If you’d rather do translations by hand, you can do so using the default WordPress text editor, which allows you to write the translation alongside the original material. You may also use the Advanced Translation Editor, which provides a side-by-side comparison that you may find more useful.
You may also allow the guests to help you with translations by giving them the user function of translator and asking them to decide which languages they know during the registration process. After that, the site owner — or someone with the editor user job — will delegate unique material to translators to focus on.
You may also use it to link your website to third-party translation services. You can choose which material needs to be translated and have it sent to your website directly.
3. Polylang
Polylang is yet another useful WordPress plugin for quickly creating a multilingual or bilingual blog. It has a user-friendly interface that allows you to quickly apply translations to your blogs, forums, custom post forms, widgets, and more.
Polylang does not have translation support for your WordPress theme and plugins. Since the default plugin does not allow eCommerce, you would need to buy a premium addon.
It lets you create SEO-friendly URLs for each language and integrate it with the most common WordPress SEO plugins. You can use a sidebar widget to connect a language switcher to your website for language collection.
You must decide which languages you want your site to endorse from the settings screen (the plugin offers just shy of a hundred options). Each language must be added separately, and each must have its two-letter language code. You may also pick a suitable flag and customize how the language name appears on your website.
You can now translate any article, website, custom post form, group, tag, or menu in WordPress. It’s worth noting that you don’t have to translate every post into every language; instead, you might choose to translate only your best-performing posts.
4. Weglot
Weglot is a website translation tool that runs on the cloud. It’s compatible with WordPress, Shopify, BigCommerce, and other platforms.
To link your WordPress site to Weglot’s website, you’ll need to join Weglot API during the setup. After that, you’ll have to choose your favorite language, site language, and additional languages.
To translate all of your posts, handle translations, and push them to your live website, you’ll need to use Weglot’s website. SEO-friendly URL support, WooCommerce support, a language switcher icon, and third-party translation services are some of its prominent features. Weglot charges a subscription fee depending on the number of languages and terms translated. This could make it more costly than any other multilingual WordPress plugins that have a yearly license.
5. MultilingualPress
MultilingualPress takes a completely different approach for WordPress to build multilingual websites. Instead of operating on a standard WordPress installation, each language uses the built-in WordPress multisite network.
This helps the plugin to handle content for each language effectively while still optimizing consistency by loading one language at a time. It has a simple guide that allows you to handle all of your translations from a single dashboard. It supports blogs, forums, custom post sizes, taxonomies, and more. Thanks to the architecture, each language may have its subdomain, registry, or even custom domain name.
6. GTranslate
GTranslate is a Google Translation plugin for WordPress that allows you to translate your website content. It links to the Google Translate API automatically and can retrieve translations for any supported language.
It helps you quickly convert your web pages by adding a language switcher, or you can automatically translate content depending on the user’s browser language. A paid version of the plugin is also available, which allows you to choose SEO-friendly URLs and allow search engines to index the translated content on your website.
It’s incredibly simple to set up: simply install the plugin, pick which languages you want to provide, and where you want the language switcher to appear, and your guest users can start translating your content.
You won’t be able to rate the material in various languages in Google, and you can’t manually change the translations as localization of the free edition is fully complex.
The paid version alters this, including an interface similar to Weglot in which all the action takes place on GTranslate’s servers. The paid version, in other words, produces SEO-friendly, indexable copies of your site for each language, including compatibility with Yoast SEO, and allows you to manually edit the translations, including SEO metadata.
7. Transposh
Transposh is a service that blends automatic computer translations with human translations. Through an easy-to-use in-context guide, you can also encourage your website visitors to contribute translations.
To send translations, you can use the plugin to recruit specialist translation services like Google, Bing, Yandex, and Apertium translation services that are supported by Transposh’s automated translation functionality.
8. Google Translate API
You will use Google Translate API to translate the website content with the Google Website Translator plugin. It makes use of Google’s default translate button, which you can place anywhere on the blog.
The language switcher, which can be displayed using the sidebar widget or an inline shortcode, allows you to choose which languages you want to view.
You may use the shortcode function to provide computer translations for particular pages on demand. When users pick a language or the plugin senses it from their browser preferences, the translated page will appear.
9. Loco Translate
Loco Translate differs from the other translation plugins on this list in a few ways. It enables you to translate WordPress themes and plugins simply.
You can use Loco Translate to translate the WordPress theme or plugin from inside the WordPress dashboard if it is translation-ready. It has a user interface close to that of common translation applications, with one column for the initial strings and the other for translation.
10. Lingotek Translation
Lingotek Translation is a great choice if you like the versatility of Polylang but don’t have the linguistic expertise to do the translations yourself. Designed on top of the Polylang plugin, Lingotek is a free cloud-based translation management framework.
Lingotek provides translations in three different formats:
- Free Automatic – Machine translation is available for free for the first 100,000 characters using the Microsoft Translator tool.
- Community – Translations given by you or your employees/users are referred to as “community translation.” The content is translated using the Lingotek Workbench, which includes a skilled text editor.
- Professional – Here you can use your translation agency or choose one from Lingotek’s marketplace of more than 5,000+ in-country translators. File transfer between WordPress and Lingotek is fully automated, and you can view the complete translation process. Once done, the translated content will be automatically downloaded and published to your website. Since the whole translation process is automated, you’ll have one less thing to worry about.
There are a few other plugins that have a good computer or group translations, but none of them matches Lingotek’s competent translation network. The use of a skilled translator ensures that translations are fast, accurate, and of good quality, resulting in a more engaged non-native audience.
Conclusion
That concludes our list of ten of the best multilingual plugins for WordPress. If you want to expand the scope of your website, use Google Analytics to see where it is most common, and then try converting it into the native language of that area.
Most of the plugins discussed here are free to import, mount, and use. This reduces the chance and, ideally, encourages more WordPress users to stretch their linguistic muscles and try out translated content on their websites.