Websites having content in more than one language is a huge advantage for the creator. You can translate your news site, or blog with the help of many plugins available in WordPress and it is one of many ways which help you to reach a wider range of audience.
Some examples of WordPress plugins for translating your site are WPML, Weglot, Polylang, etc. We recommend you to use the WPML plugin due to its easy-to-use nature, flexibility and it is affordable too.
In this article, we will further understand what WPML is, its advantages, and how to translate your site with the WPML plugin.
What is WPML?
WPML(WordPress Multilingual) is a plugin that helps in transforming a single-language website, or a blog into a multilingual platform. It is the most popular WordPress plugin for creating multilingual websites without needing to have technical or programming skills.
WordPress Multilingual(WPML) plugin has more than 1 million active installations. You can translate every sector of your website, news website, or blog. It is also compatible with many popular themes and plugins. Even with translation plugins, the translation process used to be manual and laborious work but now WPML has automatic translation with the help of DeepL, Google, or Microsoft to help you with translation.
They will provide you some sort of free credits to automatically translate your content which will be enough for a small to medium size of the website. Later on, if you require more than the given credits, you will be needing to pay an extra fee depending on the credits you use.
There are many advantages of the WPML plugin. Some of the basic benefits which you can experience are as follows.
Advantages of WPML
- Stable and secure
- Multilingual SEO
- Fully integrated with WooCommerce
- Fast and Efficient
- Gives you more control
How to Translate WordPress News Site with WPML Plugin
Before translating you would need to install WPML’s core plugins i.e.
- WPML Translation Management,
- WPML Multilingual CMS
- WPML String Translation
Creating a Multilingual WordPress site with WPML
1. Install and Activate the WPML plugin
a. Select the Language
While activating it is the first thing to do. You need to choose the default or secondary language you would like to translate your website into. The default language who you can translate into will be given by WPML.
b. URL Format of your site
After selecting the language. Choose your URL format. You can choose to format as directory structure, set up separate domains or subdomains for each language or add language as a parameter.
c. Enter the Site key
Then after completion of selecting the URL format of your site. Now, you need to register your WPML site key which you can get from your account on the WPML website.
d. Manage Translations
Then, you’ll be asked to choose two options: either to translate everything or translate some.
- Translate everything will translate the main content of the site as you publish or update. It is a fast method.
Then, you can choose to review the translation before publishing, review after publish translation or not to review and publish.
- Translate some will let you pick and choose what content to translate, when to translate and who it is translated by.
e. Support
In this step, you can give permission to share plugins and theme information with WPML to get quick support from a team.
f. Helpful Plugins
Then, the WPML will ask your permission to install the helpful plugins. You can either install those plugins now or you can select the skip option for now.
g. Finish
Lastly, you will have successfully set up WPML.
2. Translating WordPress Content
After setting up and configuring your language it’s now time to translate the contents within your website. In the post menu, you will notice the language next to your post’s title. So you can now click on the ‘+’ button to translate a post.
It is a simple process that will come easy when you do it yourself.
3. Translating Categories and tags
In order to translate the categories and tags. You need to visit WPML>>Taxonomy Translation.
And there you can select the taxonomy to translate and choose Categories and tag. Then, with the ‘+’ button underneath the language, you can add the translation.
4. Translating Menu
With the help of WPML you can translate your Menu into different languages. You can either translate the Menu manually or automatically synchronize it with menu content.
a. For it to translate manually, you need to visit Appearance>>Menus. Then, you can click on ‘+’ icon next to the other languages, which will allow you to create a new menu and link as the translation of this menu.
Then you can add the translated pages and categories to the translated menu.
b. For the menu to be translated automatically, this can be done with the help of the mode offered by WPML i.e. translate everything. This mode will translate all of the content automatically.
c. For it to be translated by synchronizing by WPML, go to WPML>>WP Menu Sync, the menu synchronization will match up the menu structure from the default language of English to the auxiliary language.
You may view the menu items that will be added to or taken out of the translated versions. To carry out the chosen actions, click the Sync button. This process will be preserved throughout WPML sync operation.
4. Translating Strings
Strings are the texts that are not in posts, pages, and taxonomy. For example: site’s tagline, general texts in admin screens, widget titles, etc.
Visit WPML>>String Translation, You first need to choose which strings to translate, then with the help of ‘+’ icon, you can translate it into the preferred language. After this, you can save the translation. This can be done by yourself or you could send strings to your translators by adding it to the translation basket.
If you no longer wish to use a certain string you can easily remove the string after selecting them and clicking on Delete selected string.
Hence, these were the points of how to create a multilingual WordPress site with the WPML plugin.
Conclusion
We have come to the end of our article on how to translate WordPress sites using WPML. With the help of this article, you can use the WPML plugin more efficiently and utilize it at its maximum. To sum it up, WPML plugin allows you to translate posts, pages, products, and many others. With the help of this, you can easily translate categories, tags, plugins and themes. Also, allowing you to set up SEO-friendly URLs for each different language.
