How WordPress Translation Plugins Work

It’s important to realize that you can find some of the most popular WordPress translation plugins for your website online. For one thing, having popular languages to translate for your website users is a must. It’s a great start for many webmasters and site owners.

So to say, that’s if you intend to reach out not only to one lingua such as English. But, of course, you may ask; what are the most common languages online for communicating on the Internet today? English is one of the most popular languages online, while Chinese is ranked second.

It’s no secret that your online presence makes your brand stronger and increases your chances of selling in any part of the world. Thanks to the Internet, there’s no limit when it comes to reaching new audiences and engaging with people from different time zones and cultures.

Why Use WordPress Translation Plugins?

There are certainly many popular languages in play Online. As a matter of fact, the internet alone can’t overcome language barriers. Notably, the English Language is the official language online. And, without a doubt, it’s also one of the most popular languages in the world.

Yet, not everyone speaks English. As an example, three in four internet users from South America, Europe, and Asia prefer buying products in their native languages. And, for more than half of them, having information in their local language is more important than price, when buying.

Getting your site translated into the top most popular languages will clearly boost your sales efforts and customer share. Choosing the right popular languages for translation depends, of course, on the business opportunities you’re looking for.

Whereby, some languages give you access to a large number of users. While others allow you to engage with fewer people. But with potentially higher purchasing power.

The most-used Languages on the Internet

Basically, the internet is not a physical place, but its population can tell us about the real world. After all, looking at some of the Internet languages on the web reveals a very huge and odd inequality.

The benefits of using the internet are undeniable. Even today, when people around the world are questioning social media’s ability to poison discourse, we can say that the internet is the defining invention of our time.

In seconds, you can communicate with anyone who has internet access anywhere in the world. You might think this would make the internet a representative microcosm of the world, where demographics are accurately represented. If you actually look at languages on the internet, however, they tell a different story.

The internet has an English problem. Namely, the English language completely dominates the content that’s put on the world wide web. Why is that so? Are there simply more English speakers than anyone else online? We looked into the linguistic anomaly.

There are two measures of language use on the internet, and they tell two different stories. If you are looking at how many people use the internet, the top 10 languages online reflect the population of the world at least somewhat accurately.

How WordPress Translation Plugins Work

The only thing better than having an excellent website is making it available in multiple languages. That way, more people will be able to enjoy your content, and you may even increase conversions. And that’s where WordPress Translation Plugins come in.

However, you might wonder how to go about creating a multilingual website – whether it’s with WordPress, or a different platform altogether. That said, WordPress is our preferred option, as it makes the process rather straightforward (if you pick the correct plugin).

Using a suitable solution should enable you to add new languages to your site, and even translate your themes and plugins if you want to go the extra mile. If you’re sold on the idea of adding more languages to your WordPress site, the only question that’s left is how to do it.

After all, this isn’t the kind of feature where you just click a button and everything’s done. However, plugins do make this feature much easier to implement than trying to do it all on your own.

The Best WordPress Translation Plugins for Multilingual Sites

It’s a global world, and if you want your website to be ready to greet people who speak different languages, you’ll need a WordPress translation plugin. It’s important to realize, creating a multilingual WordPress website isn’t as complicated as it sounds.

At a base level, simply pick the right plugin and get to work on translating your content. That last step is up to you, but you can always look into automated tools such as Google Translate if you have a tight budget and are happy to manually check translations.

Having said that, there are plenty of solutions that can help you create multilingual WordPress websites. But the highlighted plugins below beats all the odds for some are our favorites too. Below are some of the top notable and top plugins.

1. Weglot Translate

Created to simplify your translation process, Weglot gives you a reliable and easy way to take your WordPress website from local to global instantly. This no-code tool is the highest-rated WordPress translation solution on the WordPress Directory.

With a quick and simple install, Weglot is fully compatible with all WordPress themes and plugins. Weglot works by automatically detecting and translating your website content, no matter where the content is coming from (e.g any plugins you’ve added).

Your content is then displayed without the need for duplicate pages or websites. There’s no fiddly manual string by string translations. Once Weglot is installed on your WordPress site, everything is translated instantly.

All your translations are then available to edit and manage through your Weglot dashboard. This intuitive interface makes editing your translations effortless – make edits, add your team members to your translation project, or even order professional translators to fine-tune any nuances.

One of the Weglot key benefits is its ‘in context’ editor, which allows you to make changes to your translations directly inside your website design and structure – so you can see clearly where each translation is.

Some Key Features Include:

Fast 5-minute setup
Highest rated translation plugin on the WordPress Directory
Automatic and human translations
Front-end language switcher automatically added to your store
Optimized for multilingual SEO (translated URLs, metadata, and added hreflang tags)
Compatibility with all themes and plugins (incl. WooCommerce, Yoast, etc)
A unique dashboard with an ‘in context editor’, easily edit translations & invite teammates to collaborate
Expert support: a fully dedicated technical support team at your disposal

Weglot offers a free trial for 10 days so you can explore the platform and get access to all the features of a paid plan. There’s also a fully free plan for websites under 2,000 words.

As well as paid plans starting from just €9.90/month depending on the number of languages and words on your site. You can check out the number of words on your site here. And then, thereafter, if you are in love with this plugin, you can Get Started with Weglot Translate right away.

2. TranslatePress

Generally, TranslatePress is a full-fledged WordPress multilingual plugin to translate every aspect of your website. The main feature of TranslatePress is that it allows you to translate directly from the front-end. You can easily switch your popular languages during the translation.

And as you’ll note, the live preview will change instantly. Another benefit of this approach is that you can translate content, theme, plugins, and even meta-data without changing the interface. TranslatePress is perfect for manual translations. You can translate yourself or assign the custom translator user role to any user on your site.

These users will be able to translate content without access to the admin area. If manual translations sound like a lot of work, then you can also use Google Translate for machine translations. This approach allows you to use AI-powered translations with manual corrections.

To learn more, you can see the revised guide on how to easily translate WordPress with TranslatePress.

3. Polylang

Equally, Polylang is another highly popular WordPress multilingual plugin. This one enables you to add as many languages as you want to each of your posts and pages.

You’ll then work on each of those translations separately. An accurate way to describe Polylang would be as a multilingual support system rather than a translation plugin. Machine translations aren’t an option. So, you’ll need to either work on those yourself or outsource them.

Of course, depending on what you want. Once you’ve translated your content, your users will be able to switch between versions of any page using a simple drop-down menu you can place anywhere. Overall, Polylang is an excellent option.

That’s if you don’t intend to rely on automatic translations. And it also supports as many languages as you want free of cost. So, with this in mind, here is a detailed guide on how to Get Started with Polylang for beginners.

4. Loco Translate

For your information, Loco Translate is a bit different from the plugin tools we’ve covered so far. Instead of enabling you to translate your content, this plugin focuses on what’s behind the scenes. With it, you can translate your theme files, plugins, and even parts of your code.

For sure, WordPress itself is available in multiple languages, but the same can’t be said for all the tools that make it so popular. If you want the full multilingual experience (and you’re fluent in more than one language), you may want to translate all the themes and plugins you own.

Loco Translate enables you to do this by helping you go through them line by line. If you need more details on this plugin, here is a detailed guide on how to Get Started with Loco Translate Plugin for new webmasters.

5. WPML Plugin

Above all, the WPML Plugin is one of the most popular WordPress multilingual plugins. It comes with a powerful translation management system that allows you to translate content, themes, plugins, and more.

WPML comes in Multilingual blog and Multilingual CMS licensing plans. You’ll need the multilingual CMS plan for eCommerce, page builder support, custom fields, managing translation teams, and some other features.

It comes with an easy-to-use interface to add translations and manage multilingual content across your website. WPML supports all post types, taxonomies, custom fields, and strings generated by your WordPress themes and plugins.

It also allows you to connect your website to third-party translation service providers. You can select which content needs to be translated and get it submitted directly to your website. For detailed instructions, see the step-by-step guide on How to create a multilingual WordPress site with WPML.

The Best Alternative Multilingual Plugins & Services

Fortunately, from the streets of the Internet, there are just so many website translation plugins — that you can use to create multilingual websites. Unlike automated WordPress translation plugins, these multilingual plugins allow you to manually translate every aspect of your website. Including content, theme, plugins, and more.

However, before using them (unlike my two recommended — Weglot or TranslatePress — ones above), always make sure you take a look at their features first. It’s also good to look at some online reviews (what other users have to say) too. Especially, in order to grasp more about their pros and cons.

Case Study: The Top 9 Benefits of Multilingual Websites

Additionally, this also helps you pick the best option for your website — even before getting started. Likewise, you can also install WordPress in your own language too. And then use it to make websites in any language. So far, there are many translation plugins available for WordPress.

They can be characterized in two main categories:

On one hand, the multilingual plugins allow you to manually add multilingual content to your website. The main benefit of these plugins is that the quality of your translations will be significantly better than any machine-generated online translation tool.

On the other hand, the second type of WordPress translation plugins are the ones that use online translation services to translate your content. And above all, these plugins don’t require you to write content in multiple languages too. But, the quality of translations is not as good as it can be.

Overall, the process of translating a text from one language to the next is not an easy task. Luckily, tons of websites have dedicated their time to offering translation services. And to help you choose the best service among the thousands, I’ll list the best for you.

Alternative Plugins & Services Include:

In addition to the above list, you can see the Best Translation APIs to consider using. You can also consider using Translate WordPress with GTranslate too. Now that it’s also a Google Translation plugin for WordPress as well.

The Best Practices to Use Web Translation Tools

Do you think translating a website is easy? No! It’s not that simple. As can be seen, not unless you’ve got website translation plugins at your disposal. But, wait a minute. When does Google Translate come into the picture? Well, let’s have a look.

Perhaps, all you need to translate content with Google Translate is to click a button or copy-paste some results? Well… don’t! Why? Simply, because Google Translate is a rule-based translation method. It utilizes predictive algorithms. Particularly, to guess ways to translate texts into foreign languages.

Takeaway,

In reality, translating your WordPress site is a big endeavor. This isn’t like swapping out one contact form plugin for another – you really need to dig in. And also, make sure that you’ve picked the right long-term solution. Before you put hours and hours into translating your WordPress site.

On one hand, the internet penetration rate in emerging countries is growing faster than ever. Such a dynamic environment brings in changes. So, before deciding on my list of most popular languages for translation, you should think about the future.

On the other hand, some trends place other languages on top in the following years. Hindi and Korean (in Asia), Finnish and Danish (in Europe) are going to become popular languages online. So to say, as the local online markets are growing and the most popular languages will certainly change.

Finally, it’s my hope that you’ve gathered enough and useful information from this article. But, if you’ll need more support, you can Contact Us and let us know how we can help you, your content team, or even your website.

Not forgetting, for more additional opinion thoughts, suggestions, contributions, recommendations, or questions, you can share them in our comments section below.

How WordPress Translation Plugins Work | With Examples