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If you are using Wordpress as a CMS, then you probably want to present your content with multiple languages. Recently, I came across a Wordpress blog that presents their content with three different languages, so I decided to investigate the methods and plugins to turn Wordpress into a multilingual website, and share my findings with WDB’s readers.
Maintaining a multilingual website is not easy. The best way to present multilingual content to your visitors is to allow them to switch between different languages anytime. So, the plugin needs to take care of this and links different languages’ content together.
Beside linking the content, the URL of the translated content also important. There are two different ways to present your URL:
- You can have the same permalink for the translated content, and add a language flag at the end of the URL (ex: www.domain.com/multi-language-article/?lang=en, www.domain.com/multi-language-article/?lang=es, www.domain.com/multi-language-article/?lang=zh).
- The translated content will have absolutely different URL.
So, how to choose your URL is yet another main consideration before you launch the multilingual website? In SEO point of view, having an absolutely different URL will gain better advantages Later on, we are going to look into 5 different plugins to manage your multilingual Wordpress website. These plugins have their pros and cons, so choosing the best plugin that suit your needs in the most important.
1. WPML
In my opinion, WPML is the most powerful Wordpress multilingual plugin. WPML has a complete startup guide for new users and its side-wide navigation adds top navigation with drop down menus, breadcrumbs trail navigation and also sidebar navigation. WPML is rather too powerful for a simple multilingual website. You can have a lot of options and configurations through the backend admin menu. Adding a non-support language is not that easy. For example, when I tried to add a language which is not supported by default, I need to go to my MySQL backend and manually add in the SQL queries. Hopefully future version will make this easier.
2. qTranslate
qTranslate is yet another powerful multi languages Wordpress plugin. It has advantages over WPML because it allows users to add new languages to the system through the Simplistic Configuration Page. In terms of URL structure, qTranslate provides three modes to make your URLs pretty and SEO friendly:- everywhere compatible ?lang=en, simple and beautiful /en/foo or nice and neat subdomain en.domain.com.
3. ZdMultiLang
You can define multiple languages and translate posts/tags/categories using the interface that will be added to your blog’s administration panel. Adding a new user-defined language is very simple through the admin panel, but there are a couple of important things that you should check before adding a new language. For example, the language code and the language permalink. You can read more about this is the plugin website.
4. Language Switcher WordPress Plugin
Setting up the language switcher plugin to work with your Wordpress site does take some work. The official website provides a very comprehensive startup guide which covers installing, theme and plugin modifications, translating and Q & A.
5. xLanguage
xLanguage is a full featured plugin which allows you to blog in different language. It works for blog post, page, tags and categories. xLanguage uses tags to differentiate different languages and serve the content to the user based on their selected language.
Great list, thanks! I only knew WPML untill this post, think we’re going to give qtranslate à try next multi language project.
Hi Leon,
I hope you will enjoy using WPML. It is very cool, and they have premium service for you too.
Just a word of advice, qTranslate in its current version doesn’t behave well with BuddyPress – all calls BP specific sites (member listings, profiles etc.) will return a “page not found” – though I’m sure the developers are working on it. Otherwise a fantastic plugin and in my opinion quite superior to WPML.
Hi Jeriko,
Yup, you are right, i think if you want to build a multi lingual website using BuddyPress, better go for WPML, as it is the most promising and best support for BuddyPress.
Hey!
I only tried qTranslate and xLanguage.
qTranslate is good, but I don’t like that a comment to a post will be shown on all translations. What about WPML? I didn’t try it yet, but does it solve this problem?
Nope. WPML will create different posts for different languages. So the comments will only appear to that particular language only.
Interesting topic. Please correct the spelling mistake in title, should write build not built.
These are cool language translators. Perhaps you could also include a plugin which incorporates google translate service. It is really good.
Check it out – http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/google-ajax-translation/
Hi,
I planned to include this plugin when i first draft this article. But i removed it since this plugin doesn’t provide any local copy of translation.
If you go through these multi lingual plugins, you will soon discover that i only include plugin which lets author manually translate the content, as i think manually translate is always better than automatic.
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I have always used Google’s Translate and works fine and easy to add the code into a blog or site. However I think all auto-translators are nowhere near 100% accurate. You cannot replace a human translator… yet !!
thanks for the great post.
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there is also a great plugin named “Transposh translate”. Download at http://transposh.org/
This plugin uses several translation services
Hi,
Thanks for introducing this great plugin to our readers!
helfpul plugins, thanks for share..
Hi, Great post.
I’m currently looking at updating my site using wordpress. The site is a tourist site promoting the island of Ibiza (Spain) and needs to support English, Spanish, German, French, Italian and Catalan. I’m debating on whether to use qtranslate or google translate tool.
I’m leaning towards qtranslate because it’s more SEO friendly.
Any suggestions?
Thanks
Hi Mig,
I’ll choose qTranslate as it has more controls over Google translate. However, if you want a fast translation, you can go for Google Translate.
Thanks for this Useful post, i really like your blog. now i am going to bookmark this as my favorite blogs lists.
Hi Guidesigner,
Thanks and i am glad that you link my blog
Hi,
Thanks for this great info. I already used language switcher but this is not good for SEO. Now I am going to try qTranslate which looks good. A few months ago I was investigating multilanguage plug-ins myself but this page wasn’t written at that time. Thanks for the clear information!
Best regards,
Patrick
Hi Patrick,
You are welcome. I hope my information will help you in your future projects
WPML is a WordPress plugin that can turn WordPress and WordPressMU into complete multilingual content management systems.I understand them . Thank you very much
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tuyen dung | tim viec | viec lam
Wow … thanks for the list of plugins.
Some of those look very useful. It’s too bad I didn’t have this list a few months ago when I was working on a multi-lingual project.
I’ve bookmarked it for future reference!
Hello Dicky,
Great piece of info ! Thanks
Where can I find your “5 different plugins to manage your multilingual Wordpress website” if ready yet ?
I’m developing a multilingual site to geo targeting and have already different ccTLDs… I was wondering best way to implement that
All the best!
Hi Linus,
Due to the privacy issue, i can’t show you any multilingual websites that i had built. But i think you can view example of multilingual websites by search for “wpml showcase” from Google. Hope that helps.
Hi Dicky !
Thank you for your article.
I guess we are a LOT of users interested in having more information about the 2 leaders WPML and QTtranslate.
It seems that QTranslate is quite easy to deal with but I read that it is not optimized for SEO. WPML seems much better on this side.
So what about publishing an article like QTranslate vs WPML? Not just to say which one is best but to compare a dozen of points. That would help users to make a choice.
Maybe somebody experimented on both plugins could also reply to this comment…
THANK YOU and keep up the good work!