Since the turn of the new millennium, internet has been essential to mankind. Websites, being the heart and soul of the internet changed the way people lived. One glaring problem people encountered though, is that websites tend to have one language. Thus, it renders the website useless to people who don’t understand the language it was written in. If this is the case for you, a translation plugin could be the answer to create your WordPress Multilingual Site.
How is a WordPress Multilingual Site beneficial?
Nowadays, people from different countries where English isn’t a first language, such as Germany, China, Japan and Spain, use the web more than ever before. They use websites to search for information or make online purchases and these people would prefer to do so on websites that are in their own language. Hence, if you are an online business owner or have a personal website and want to reach a global audience, it’s important for you website to be multilingual.
With WordPress, the most popular free and open-source content management system, creating a multilingual site is quite simple. There are lots of free and premium translation plugins available for translating WordPress websites either automatically or manually. I’ll introduce you to 3 translation plugins that you can check out and use.
WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin)
Price: $29-$195
“WPML makes it easy to build multilingual sites and run them. It’s powerful enough for corporate sites, yet simple for blogs.”
There are 40 built-in languages and you can also add your own language using the languages editor. Just choose the languages you’ll be using for your site and start translating the content. It’s easy to translate posts, pages, custom post types, menus, taxonomy and even the theme’s texts using this plugin.
WPML works with most wordpress themes, just use the WordPress API functions and WPML takes care of the rest.
This is a product of OnTheGoSystems and is well supported 6 days a week, 19 hours a day, in 9 languages.
Google Language Translator
Price: Free
It’s quick and easy to install this plugin. Google Language Translator automatically translates your content to the selected language. You can insert the Google Language Translator tool anywhere on your website by simply using shortcode.
MultilingualPress
Price: Free
“MultilingualPress enables you to publish translated versions of your WordPress site. Switch between languages just by hitting a link, or redirect your visitors automatically to their preferred language according to their browser settings.”
Have lots of website that need to be translated? With MultilingualPress connecting them with each other is as easy as pie. Just set the main language for each website, create connections, and you can start writing. A new field will be added to create a linked post on all the connected sites automatically. They are accessible via the post/page editor screen – you can switch back and forth to translate them. This plugin has a Language Manager which offers 174 languages that can be edited.
They also offer premium support for 99$, to get direct help from the plugin developers.
There are many other plugins available which offer different features and it’s important that you know what is right for your site needs.
At Project Assistant, we evaluate your site content and target audience to select the most ideal method that suits your site. We’ll help you prepare your site content and take the huge step of placing your business in front of a global audience.
