Best Auto-Translation Plugins for WordPress

Having the content of your website available in different languages can mean a much bigger audience for you. A very simple way to do this is to provide automatic translators, they’re not the same as manually translating all your content, but do a pretty good job. It’s better to have an automatic translation plugin than nothing at all.

The alternative to automatic translations is, of course, to use a manual translation plugin such as WPML, Weglot, Polylang, or any of the others in our round-up of manual translation plugins here.

Here are the best automatic translation plugins you can use.

TranslatePress

TranslatePress is a great option for quick and easy automatic and manual website translations. With its friendly visual interface, similar to the WordPress customizer, it works out of the box with any WordPress theme or plugin.

The plugin integrates automatic translation via Google Translate or DeepL. To reduce costs and increase page loading speed the plugin stores the translations locally, in your own database. 

Some features of the TranslatePress plugin include:

• Both automatic and manual translations
• Full website translation (you can translate everything you see)
• Compatible with all WordPress themes and plugins
• Visual interface with live preview of the translated content
• Support for any language, offering the option to manually add any custom language
• Support for RTL layouts
• SEO translations – taxonomy/terms slugs, URL slugs, SEO page title, page meta description, image alt tags, social share title and description
• Media translation – replace images, files, and videos on your translated version
• Specific accounts for professional translators to review the machine translations without having access to the admin dashboard

Here’s a quick video tutorial on how to use TranslatePress’ automatic translation functionality:

WPML

WPML provides the best of both worlds because not only can you automatically translate your content but you can also limit the mistakes that can come with machine translation.

WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor allows you to translate each post/page with a click of a button. It also has a number of other features including:

• A spell-checker to avoid any spelling or grammatical errors
• HTML markers so you can freely edit without worrying about accidentally breaking your pages by deleting some coding
• Translation memory – Advanced Translation Editor remembers repeat sentences on your website and automatically adds the translation
• The ability to create a glossary with translation suggestions of important words for translators
• Assign jobs to professional translators who can easily review your machine translation and ensure it is of a high standard

Of course, if you want to manually translate your content, WPML is a great option. It is already used by more than 800,000 websites around the world and the team has revamped its String Translation to reduce load page times by more than 50%. Here’s a look at the Advanced Translation Editor in action.

Weglot

Simply put, Weglot is the easiest and fullest WordPress translation solution on the market. The installation takes just under 5 minutes and combines machine translation with manual editing capabilities and access to pro translators – so you can get the translation quality you want. Weglot works by automatically detecting all the content on your WordPress website – including dynamic content and content from other plugins. It then translates and displays your website content under language subdirectories. Weglot includes the following features:

• Automatic, manual and access to pro translators
• Full website translation
• Compatible with all WordPress themes and plugins (e.g. WooCommerce)
• Automatically set up for multilingual SEO
• Detects hidden elements, e.g. alt text, meta content, and titles
• Media translation – replace images, files, and videos on your translated version
• 100+ languages supported
• Unique visual editor allowing you to make edits to your translations in a live preview of your website

Here’s a video on how to install Weglot on your WordPress website: 

Are you using any translation plugins? Share your experience on whether such plugins have helped you widen your audience.

If you are looking for a more comprehensive translation system for WordPress, consider the WPML Multilanguage and translation plugin, it’s our top recommendation here at WP Mayor.