Translate WordPress: Top Plugins for Translation
You never know who you might be designing for, and at some point you or a client will need a WordPress website translated. But how do you translate WordPress? It doesn’t have to be complicated.
There are tons of great WordPress plugins that you can use to make the translation process easier. But no matter which one you choose, each of the following plugins will help your get your translations finished in a jiffy. No coding required. Now let’s go translate WordPress!
Weglot
The first plugin you should have a look at is Weglot Translate – a free plugin to translate WordPress on any website. The plugin is completely free for small websites with a single translation, but can be easily upgraded to unlock full translation capabilities.
If you upgrade to Weglot premium, it includes 60+ built-in translation languages, features a customizable language switch button and much more. The plugin even gives you easy access to recommended professional translators who are available for hire (a very valuable investment if you ask us).
The best part of Weglot is the ease of use. You literally install the plugin, configure a handful of settings (original language and destination languages being the most important) and the plugin does the translating for you. If you encounter any translations that don’t quite work for your website use the quick link in the plugin dashboard to edit your translation. This takes you to your Weglot account where you can enter the “in context editor” to make live edits to your website. It’s super easy to use to translate WordPress – just give it a try!
TranslatePress
The TranslatePress free multilingual translation plugin is an excellent option to make your WordPress site multilingual. After installing the plugin you should see a new Settings tab for TranslatePress. From here you can set a default language as well as format additional translations. This is also where you can access the optional Google Translate feature, which will create an automatic translation for your site in a given language.
For manual translations, this free WordPress plugin includes an easy and intuitive translation interface. Simply click on the “Translate Page” option in the admin bar when logged in and browsing your site. If you’re familiar with the WordPress customizer, it should be easy for you to get started with TranslatePress’ editor. Simply point and click to begin translating various sections on your page. Then use the provided text boxes to create your multilingual translations (note: the available language boxes are determined by the languages you define in the TranslatePress settings).
For more features, upgrade to a TranslatePress Personal, Business or Developer plan. This adds powerful features for additional languages, SEO translations (page tile, meta description, URL, image alt, etc), custom translator user role permission, ability to preview translated pages as any user role, custom language based site navigation and automated user language detection. If you’re running a simple blog, the free version should be just fine. However, for businesses and bloggers with a focus on SEO upgrading to premium is your best bet.
WPML.org
WPML.org (affiliate link) is one of the premier WordPress translation plugins. Take a look at the top selling WordPress themes and developers around the web. You’ll notice that most of them make a point of creating themes compatible with WPML.org specifically.
Why? Because WPML.org is a powerful translation WordPress plugin with 40 built-in languages, options for custom language variants, compatibility with single or multi-site installations and great support. With the quick setup wizard you can start translate WordPress sites in just minutes. Just use one of the included languages, with no coding required on your part. And once you’ve completed a translation, simply add a dropdown for your language selections to your website navigation menu.
While there are free translation plugins available, WPML.org is a quality product with decent support. Plus you’ll never have to worry if the plugin works with the latest version of your theme or WordPress. They’re constantly updating to ensure their plugin works for your and your readers.
Polylang
Polylang is a great option when manually translating your WordPress site into more than one language. This free WordPress plugin includes support for over 50 languages. It’s very likely that the language you need is included as a default. However, there is support for custom languages if you don’t find yours. Polylang works by allowing you to set a language for each post or page as your add them. This takes the hard part out of trying to keep your translated posts separated.
A great feature of this free plugin is that on install it gives you the option to automatically set all your content to a default language. This means you don’t have to go back through old posts to set the language page by page. It also supports an option to detect a user’s browser language and automatically use that language to translate WordPress pages on your site (if it’s a translation you have available).
Multilingual Press
Multilingual Press works with your WordPress multisite installation to link your website translations (one language per site). The plugin comes with 174 languages built into the language manager, and it supports and unlimited number of websites – so you can create and link as many translations as you need.
This is great for SEO since it keep your languages on separate posts and pages, and if you ever decide to use a different translation plugin your content remains in tact (even after deactivating or deleting Multilingual Press). Plus you can add the translations widget to any widget ready areas so your readers can quickly navigate between translations.
Multilingual Press is a great free option for adding translations to your WordPress website via multisite. Plus if you ever find that you need more options your can always upgrade to their Pro version for $75. This includes support for custom post types, automatic language redirects, quick-links and more making it easier to translate WordPress posts, pages and even WooCommerce products.
Ajax Translator Revolution
The Ajax Translator Revolution Dropdown (affiliate link) WP Plugin is a great way to add language options to your WordPress site. This plugin adds a clean and simple language selection dropdown to your site.
When you have a popular website, you need to cater to visitors from all over the world. With the Ajax Translator Revolution Dropdown WP Plugin you can give visitors to option to choose from more than 100 languages. The dropdown is easy to use, and is able to remember language preferences. You can also set the plugin to translate all or some of your content. Translate everything or select/exclude pages, posts or categories. It’s up to you. With 90 customizable settings, this plugin is sure to meet your needs.
Use 90 customizable settings, language flags and/or names, advanced positioning tools, user language preferences, and more to create your dropdowns. Ajax Translator Revolution Dropdown even integrates into the main WordPress admin and adds tabbed panels to make management easy.
GTranslate
GTranslate is a WordPress multilingual plugin that makes your website multilingual using human and free machine translations instantly upon installation. Setting up the plugin is as easy as drinking water. Once you configure GTranslate, your website will automatically be translated to the languages you choose.
Machine translations are not the best, this is why paid version of GTranslate allows you to edit these translations and add human translations.
GTranslate will not slow your website as the translated version of your website is not being pulled from your website server. Instead, GTranslate hosts the translated content in the could network (also known as the translation delivery network). As a result, GTranslate will not impact your website performance in any way.
qTranslate (Depreciated)
qTranslate is a free translation plugin from the WordPress plugin repository. With nearly 1.2 million downloads it’s a popular and free option for translating your website. Just install it and get to work creating your translations. The plugin will add multiple tabs to each post or page that you create based on which languages you’ve selected. This makes manual translations much faster since you can quickly navigate between tabs as you add your different content translations.
qTranslate does include multiple languages for automated translations. However this service will only provide readers with a general idea of your content since it will be a bit choppy (it translates what you write literally so it won’t read naturally to native speakers of the given language you’re translating to). But if you want to translate WordPress with a free plugin qTranslate certainly gets the job done well. The plugin also includes a custom qTranslate widget that you can add to your site for users to easily switch between languages. Your can learn more and download the plugin on the WordPress repository.
How Do You Translate WordPress?
Translations are often a time consuming process. Hopefully with these helpful plugins you’ll be able to translate WordPress without much of a headache.
Let us know if you’ve ever used any of the above translation plugins and what you think of them. Or if you’ve tried another plugin to translate WordPress that was just awesome let us know. Leave a comment with the plugin name in the section below. I’d love to hear from you!
Further Reading
You may be interested in the following related articles:
Thanks for sharing with us
Hello, I’m trying to translate the WPEX Blogger Free theme with the MO file but when I translate the file and make a nl_NL.mo and nl_NL.po file in the language folder he doesn’t translate! Can someone tell me how it will be?
Did you define your language in your wp-config file?
Yes, I did that….
define(‘WPLANG’, ‘nl_NL’);
I have the same issue. I think it is because WordPress 4.0 detects the language of your browser. How can one switch this off?
Hi, what is the plugin you are using to the “about the author”?
We are using the “Fanciest Author Box” plugin.
Hey everyone, has everyone tried Bablic? It seems pretty cool, everything is completely automated, and they detect changes in the original site and send to translation automatically. no need to lift a finger.. ) also you can choose the type of translation you want (machine, professional). I used their interface to translate the website myself to save money but the professional solution seems really comfortable
Hi there, thanks for your very helpful tutorial. Would you happen to have any experience with this plugin combined with the OneEngine theme. The minute I install the Polylang plugin my menu disappears, which is quite essentials to have. Any tip or tricks to avoid this?
Many thanks.
I’ve never tried the two together, but you could always reach out to the folks at EngineThemes or start a new Polylang support thread to see if they can help you out 🙂
Thanks for the nice collection of wordpress translation plugins. I really like your post! Lot’s of information. Thanks. Nice site!
I think WPML and Polylang are the best options for 90% of the sites. Multilingual Press & Multisite is worth while only to a certain kind of sites, and people should be aware it’s rather complicated to setup and maintain.
Great article, thanks Kyla.
I have previously tried a number of these plugins. Although well developed, we found obtaining the translations and inserting creating the translated pages to be quite laborious.
That is why we developed the Scrybs Multilingual WordPress plugin. It allows a user to add as many websites and languages as one likes. Simply downloading the plugin will allow you to push WordPress content to a cloud dashboard where you can manage all of your translations. Content is continually synced and updated into your chosen language (no need to manually update). It is completely 100% SEO friendly and serves up all the your translated source code to the local language search engines. You can also order professional translations right off the dashboard.
Best,
Greg
It’s really a great and helpful piece of line. I am glad that you shared this helpful info with us. Please keep us informed like this.
Thanks for sharing.
Thanks for this great post, though am looking for how to implement it
Great list, Kyla 🙂
I’m using Weglot and Neuronto DeepL WordPress plugin to translate my blog 🙂
I like neuronto because it automates translation and generates high quality posts by using AI
I haven’t tried Neuronto DeepL yet – but I might need to. It looks great! It’s awesome that you can create new pages based on the translation or override content (handy if you dupe a site on subdomains/subfolders).