Are you needing to translate your WordPress website into a different language? What’s the best WordPress plugin to help you do that? Here’s Kori’s opinion on some great resources for you.
Full Video Transcript by Mally LaPete
Hey, y’all. Welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name is Kori Ashton. Today I’m going to walk you through translation. How to turn your WordPress website from English to other languages. From Spanish to English. However you want to do it. I’m going to give you a couple of plugin ideas that will help you easily, in just a couple of clicks, be able to have your entire website translated into multiple languages. How cool is that?! It was actually a question sent in to us by Percy off of our YouTube channel. Thank you so much, Percy, for giving us a quick comment and asking us to do this video for you. Way to go!
Let’s just get into it. Today, is going to be a quick, easy video. I’ve had a couple of people give me some feedback that I talk too quickly. I’m a southern gal. Normally, I’m supposed to talk a little slow [using strong Southern accent], and have a little bit of a draw in there. [using normal voice] But, no. I actually do talk pretty quickly. So, if you need to pause this video, just click pause. We’re going to move pretty quickly into this.
If you want your website to easily move from English to any other language, there are 3 plugins I’m going to show you. This particular one here is WordPress Multilingual Plugin. This is a premium plugin. All of these that I’m going to show you today are premium with the exception of one that has an upgrade possibility for you to have support. For what you get, and for the audience that you can grow your website to, these are highly worth it. This particular plugin here gives you a lot of information. It’s going to give you a list of features, as well as a demo that I will show you right here. This particular video actually teaches you how to go in here and install it, and how to select different languages that you want the website to be translated into. The other incredibly powerful thing about this particular plugin is that it allows you to translate your dashboard area. What!?!
So, let’s say you have somebody who is a client that only speaks Spanish, and you want them to be able to log into their website and make edits, you can do that with this particular plugin. Pretty spectacular. I’m going to put the link to this in the description box below so that you can access it yourself and walk through this entire video. It’s pretty spectacular. Oh, and, another cool thing about this particular plugin is that it allows you to translate things yourself. I know that’s kind of not the purpose of this, but if you want to be able to have a button that says, “This page in Spanish.” or something, it gives you the opportunity to submit your own version of that particular page or post.
One of the reasons why that might be important is totally dependent upon the topic that your website covers. If your website is very involved in your industry, maybe it has a lot of technical terms, sometimes translators get it wrong. You’re going to want to be able to go in there and do some editing to things and you can do that with this particular plugin.
Moving on, here’s another premium plugin [SurStudio] for $20-25 [US] depending on how you want it to display. I’ve purchased this a couple of times and used it on a couple of clients’ websites. Let me show you how it works. Here’s the English version. You can see right here that there’s a drop-down option. Depending upon what languages you set, they will appear here in this drop-down and your page will completely be translated. Now this affects your menu bar across the top. This affects everything that is sitting in regular text mode. This will not change your images that have text on them. This will only change anything setting in text mode. One of the other great things about this particular plugin right here [SurStudio], is that if I were to change to a different page, it remembers that I’m asking for the website to be in Spanish and it will immediately translate that page as well for me so that I don’t have to choose that option again. So, that’s pretty cool, right? And, if you didn’t want it to display on your menu bar here in a drop-down format, this particular author gave you another opportunity to display in a different manner, and it can display up here at the top. I’ll put the links in the description box below so you can get to both of those plugins. They are premium: $20-25 [US]. That’s over in envato marketplace Code Canyon. This one [SurStudio] is the $20, and it’s the one that displays across the top (like this) of your website.
And the last and final one I’m going to tell you about today is this one: Multilingual Press. This is a free one for you to use. However, I want you to see what this is for. This creates a fast translation network on a WordPress multisite. If you have multiple websites that are all kind of interconnected through multisite … If I’m speaking Greek to you right now, don’t worry about that. You don’t have a website set up like this then … But if you do, this particular plugin gives you the opportunity to have an entire version of your website translated into Spanish. Or an entire version of your website translated into French, or whatever language it is you’re choosing. I will put the link to this particular plugin in the description box below.
Here’s my fine print: I do not personally offer any sort of support for these plugins, but the authors do. What you want to be looking for whenever you’re installing any plugin, for that matter, is you want to be sure it is going to be compatible with your version. You want to be sure it was updated recently. When you’re watching this video, be sure to come in here and vet or confirm that the author has kept this plugin up-to-date so that it’s secure and that it’s going to work with your website. You also want to check out the ratings and be sure that people are saying that this plugin works the way it says it works, especially when you’re looking to purchase a premium plugin, and it’s not just a freebee. You’re about to invest $25. You’re going to make an investment. It’s been sold over a thousand times. It’s got a lot of comments on here. You’ve got 5-star rating. It was created in November of 2012. However, it was updated this year. [ October 2015 ] It tells you what versions it’s compatible with. And it will give you all the other descriptions as you read down through here. I’ll put these links in the description box below.
I appreciate Percy sending in a great question for us today. I hope this helps you. [speaking Spanish] Yo hablo Espanol para mucho poquito. (laughter) [speaking English] I couldn’t translate a site if I wanted to, but being from San Antonio, we have a lot of viewers that love Spanish. And we need to have that capability. If you need your WordPress website translated, check out this video. I hope it helped you. If you have any other questions, put them in the comment box below and we’ll do our best to make a video for you. Have a great WordPress Wednesday. Bye bye, y’all.
