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As we know that WordPress is not multilingual by default. We need to embed plugins to make it support different languages. Since the concept of "global connectivity" is growing at a rapid pace, businesses need to create ways for communicating with others easily and in the most seamless way.
It's not surprising that there is a large chunk of people who do not speak English. In fact, we often find a lot of people in support forums who converse in different languages. To make sure that your website attracts people globally, it is worthwhile to make it friendly for those who do not speak English. One way to do is by building a localized version for your website for each region or country or you can use plugins to make it automatically support the language of the country it's being browsed.
In this post, we will show you some top-notch multilingual WordPress plugins that will help you turn any WordPress site into a multilingual site.
Polylang
Polylang is a powerful WordPress plugin that allows you to create multilingual websites with ease. With Polylang, you can effortlessly manage translations for posts, pages, media, categories, tags, menus, widgets, and even custom post types and taxonomies. The plugin provides a user-friendly interface that simplifies the process of adding and editing translations, making it accessible to both beginners and experienced WordPress users.
One of the standout features of Polylang is its flexible language setup. You can create a bilingual or multilingual site using a variety of language models, including a different subdomain or domain for each language, a single directory, or even just adding language information to the URL. This flexibility ensures that you can adapt the language setup to fit your specific requirements and existing website structure.
Polylang also offers excellent compatibility with other plugins, themes, and WordPress extensions. It seamlessly integrates with popular plugins like WooCommerce, allowing you to build a multilingual e-commerce store effortlessly. Additionally, it supports RTL (right-to-left) languages, making it suitable for websites catering to languages such as Arabic, Hebrew, and Persian.
TranslatePress
TranslatePress is a popular WordPress plugin that makes website translation a breeze. With TranslatePress, you can easily create multilingual websites and translate your content directly from the front-end, providing a seamless and intuitive translation experience.
One of the standout features of TranslatePress is its visual translation editor. It allows you to translate your website's content in real-time, directly from the front-end, with a live preview of the changes. This means you can see exactly how your translations will appear to visitors as you work on them. Additionally, TranslatePress supports a wide range of languages, making it suitable for websites catering to various linguistic communities.
TranslatePress also offers compatibility with other popular WordPress plugins, themes, and page builders, ensuring a seamless integration into your existing website setup. Furthermore, it supports translation of dynamic elements such as WooCommerce products, making it an ideal choice for e-commerce websites.
MultilingualPress
MultilingualPress is an awesome WordPress translation plugin designed to link multiple websites with each other. The plugin allows you to set the main language for each site, connect all of them, and write for them. It enables you to translate your website into 174 different languages. Each translation of a page can be viewed under WordPress the post editor. The plugin is also available in the pro version, with some additional collection of features such as automatically redirecting your visitors to the translated content, provides support for custom types, and offer several other useful settings on the back end.
This plugin does not change the existing database. The details of the relationships between translated content are stored in two specialized and highly optimized tables instead (one for posts and terms, on for site relationships). You can safely drop those tables, and all the other tables will stay intact, all the existing content will stay available. No other plugin offers this amount of data integrity. See the comment for full description, very interesting!
WPML
WPML is all you need to easily build and run a multilingual website. It comes complete with the support for 40 languages, plus, you also have the facility for adding language variables such as local dialects, by using the language editor. WPML is so popular that it becomes a kind of standard for WordPress themes and plugins. At the moment, it's the most popular and completed solution for the multilingual problem. I highly recommend using this plugin in your websites.
The plugin is fantastic enough to translate the page, posts, custom types, taxonomies and even themes. It is also compatible with a myriad of themes and plugins and is often updated by the WordPress' webmasters.
The plugin is great in many of the aspects but if you love simplicity then WPML might not be the choice for you. The plugin has a bit complicated structure and needs to hook WordPress functions and filter them to make only those contents displayed that matches the language. Plus, you need to manage some additional tables, to hold the translation grouping.
We have a tutorial on how to use WPML to translate custom fields.
Google Language Translator
Google Language Translator lets you add a language widget with up to 81 flags anywhere on your website. It also displays a drop-down menu to show the list of all the languages supported by the website. You can also add a widget to posts and pages using a shortcode, and on themes as well with the help of PHP functions.
One of the best advantages of using Google Language Translator is its ability to effectively manage multiple languages directly via Google accounts and tracking site traffic through Google Analytics.
However, the plugin has its own flaws as well. It makes mistakes and sometimes the quality of translation varies from language pair to language pair.
Conclusion
Translation plugins are one of the best ways to give a touch of internationalization to your business. They are perfect for encouraging a good user experience, regardless of which language they speak or which country they belong to.