It is said that every language is a world in itself. This means that every language spoken in the world projects a separate world of its own—a point made by George Steiner who elaborated the importance of translation when he said “without translation, we would be inhabiting provinces bordering on silence”.
But just how important is translation in the “world of words”? We all know that language is the main selling factor when it comes to taking the decision to go global. And your WordPress site is your tool in taking that leap to attaining global audience. This is where multilingual WordPress site enters the stage. You would not risk losing a major chunk of international customers just because your WordPress site is not multilingual, would you?
To make sure your WordPress site is understood by audience residing across your native border, WordPress translation plugins are the main elements. Here are the 7 best WordPress translation plugins to make your ride to globalization a smooth one:
Polylang
Polylang is a popular WordPress translation plugin that is lightweight and easy to use. With over 200,000+ active installs, Polylang allows you to assign a language to individual posts, categories, posts and pages. Furthermore, it supports more than 40 languages, enabling use of unique subdomains for each language. All your generic strings can be translated in Polylang’s interface—things like site title, date format and other website information.
This is all good on the translation front, but here is the catch—the translations have to be done manually. Unless you install other plugins as an add-on.
Lingotek Translation
Termed as one of the best WordPress translation plugins, Lingotek offers an easy route to creating and handling multilingual sites through convenient cloud-based localization and translation. It offers a blend of automated machine and crowd-sourced translation to create and maintain a multilingual website. The icing on the cake? It supports RTL language scripts and is sourced out to 5000+ in-country translators. The only downside of this plugin is the loss of categories and featured images in the translated posts.
WPML (WordPress Multilingual Plugin)
When it comes to choosing WordPress translation plugin, WPML is the at the top of the game supporting an outstanding track record of letting you translate anything—from WordPress pages , taxonomy, posts, menus, and themes to texts. The licenses of WPML starts from $79 for premium version but the benefits far outweigh the costs. WPML offers both auto-translate and self-translate categories.
In auto-translation, it syncs with ICanLocalize and in manual translation, it allows translation via default WordPress editor. You can even encourage visitors to provide translation for you by assigning them the role of translator and the content that needs to be translated. Also, you can totally depend on this plugin to provide translation for the backend of your website. What more can a WordPress translator ask for?
Q-Translate X
For several years in the past, q-Translate was one of the best multilingual plugins on the official WordPress repository. However, as the updates became less frequent, this plugin was removed from the repository. q-Translate X followed the demise of q-Translate, loaded with more functionalities than that of q-Translate, with features similar to Polylang.
It comes with a configuration of flags and language codes for 25 of the most widely spoken languages with language switching buttons to let users switch languages while editing posts. Moreover, it not only offers free machine translation, it also supports professional translation by humans.
Multilingual Press
Different approaches to translations can go a long way in changing how things are done in the world of translation and Multilingual Press adopts just that different approach. Instead of translating content within the existing site, it creates separate installs for each language with the use of WordPress Multisite. What’s the benefit in this approach? If you ever need to deactivate Multilingual Press, your translations would not disappear like they do with other plugins. Although the interface would be lost, the actual translated versions would still be intact.
MultilingualPress currently supports 174 languages and lends further convenience to its users by allowing them to edit all translations from the same original post editor so they don’t actually need to switch sites to edit the translations.
GTranslate--Google Translate
If making your WordPress site visible to maximum number of internet users out there is your objective, there is no better solution than GTranslate which has a command over 500000 multilingual websites worldwide. It comes with a built-in feature that allows you to open the translated page in a new window and is integrated with Google analytics. It provides separate URLs to individual language and also translated the provided URLs. Even better, it supports different styles like flags, dropdown and flags with dropdown, ensuring fast loading since all flags are combined in one file.
Weglot is a relatively new player in the multilingual solution world but has already gained fame among the websites and now more than 10000 websites are using its services. It is quick and easy to install I addition to coming with a free plan for small websites and is SEO friendly, compatible with any theme or plugin. Users can even use automatic translation or manual translation through a straightforward editing platform.
The Final Verdict: Which plugin to use?
So after our rundown review of the 7 best WordPress translation plugins, the question arises “which one should you use?” –that depends largely on how you mean to use it. Some plugins require you to provide the translations while others support automated services. No two plugins are completely alike, as you may have noticed from the reviews above.
In the end, choose how you plan to translate your content, then narrow down your choices according to your plan. All of the plugins mentioned here are the best of the whole stock—so they will bring out the best results, whichever one you pick!
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