How to make your website multilingual with WordPress
Having a multilingual blog or website is a decision that many website owners have to make. If you don’t live in an english speaking country then your native language differs from english and you ask yourself what language to write your website in.
If you want to go global, the answer is definately english, but what to do with your friends that face difficulties reading your website and you may rely on them to help you promote the website.
There are many offline methods to promote your online website, but if you live in a country where English is not a native language then you have to take care of the other language too. You go to conferences locally, events and you want to promote your website.
The best thing to do is to choose to have both languages on your website. How hard it is ? Well, you have to write the content in both languages, this takes a lot of time, but if you can do it or if you don’t have a very high amount of content then you go straight to technical issues.
If you website is built on wordpress then you are almost done. There are many language plugins that can do the work for you.
The best multilingual plugin i’ve found is qtranslate. It is very simple and your users can switch language with one click.
When the content is added you are asked to write the text in both languages. Let’s say you have english and spanish. If you don’t write the spanish version of a page or post that element is not visible in the spanish version, very simple.
You will have a main language ( english probably ) and visitors who want to see the spanish version will click a link and they will be redirected to the spanish version which will have urls formed with sitename.com/es/category/post . The language prefix is added to your url so when you want to show the spanish version to someone you just give him the spanish url.
Once a visitor clicked the link to switch language, the website remembers trough a cookie what language he prefers. When he will visit the second time he will be redirected to the language of his preference.
Disclosure: Some of the links in this post are "affiliate links." This means if you click on the link and purchase the item, I will receive an affiliate commission
December 13th, 2010 at 6:44 pm
I’ve used wp-tralsnate before and I wasn’t satisfied, is this plugin any better ?
December 13th, 2010 at 9:17 pm
I think qtranslate is the better, it will create different urls for any language, let you choose the title of the content for posts and pages or anything else you may need. It is also good for programming as you can use a hook to write text in both languages directly into your template.
March 29th, 2012 at 12:33 pm
Hi Lucian, I found this post useful and agree with functionality you describe. Your blog is very interesting. The qTranslate plugin makes WordPress very multilingual friendly & is actually linked with a professional translation agency Live Translation which displays the price of the translation service in WordPress if you need translations done for you. It’s compatible with many SEO plugins and is well maintained so it is always compatible with recent releases of WordPress. Users can buy professional human translated website posts directly from the WordPress dashboard using PayPal, and the text is returned directly into WordPress. Yes as simple as that!
April 2nd, 2012 at 12:52 pm
Thank you for your comment. When I used the plugin I noticed that translations can be brought directly from the plugin. Nice to meet someone from that team. However, if someone want the website in 2 languages, he or his team should know them both so they can make changes whenever they want.
But, many thimes I tried to think about my websites being provided in more languages, so people will feel more secure with content in their language. What will cost me to have a simple website ( not a blog ) translated into 3 other languages. For example this website. The translation is only required for homepage and the landing page. Let’s say that the languages will be deutsch, french and spanish.
April 15th, 2012 at 12:27 pm
Hi Lucian,
Yes it is ideal if the people in the team know the language.
However if you wish to localise your website to other languages this plugin has the functionality to do so.
The translated website posts are brought directly from the WordPress dashboard using PayPal. The price is per word at 0.07 Euro it is much cheaper than anywhere else, and so easy to use as well.
Only professional human translations are provided by Live Translation and the text is returned directly into WordPress automatically appearing on the website.
Here are some examples of qTranslate.
Please get in touch, I’ll be happy to discuss this in more detail – Email: info@livetranslation.com
April 17th, 2012 at 1:42 pm
Tha rate seems ok, but it is the price for human translation or automated ?
April 26th, 2012 at 1:10 pm
Human translation only!