Translate your website

When it comes to make your website in more than one single language, we have multiple options:

Option 1: Let Google do the work

Google chrome users know the drill: when a foreign language is detected, the browser offers to translate the web page automatically using Google Translate engine. Similar tools are availble in other browser such as Internet Explorer or Firefox, but might require users to install a plugin.

This works OK when you are looking to a website in a language you don’t know and still want to have a rough idea of what it’s talking about. But the translation is approximate and can lead to embarrassing misunderstandings.

Option 2: Translate it all manually

In this case, you would either duplicate each page and post of your website to translate them, or use a plugin which allows you to translate each content in multiple language.

Probably the best option if you want to keep control over everything, and master all languages you want to use on your website.

But this requires a lot of time, and can generate huge expenses, especially if you hire professionnals to translate the content of each page and articles.

Option 3: Semi automatic translation

A great compromise would be to get your website automatically translated at first, and manually correct mistranslations when needed.

This method is available within the NSO website network: we use the Transposh Translation Filter plugin to do so.

Simply enable the Transposh plugin from the plugin section in the backend, and go through a few simple steps:

1. Go through its settings to select the languages you need
2. Add a widget in your sidebar or footer to allow your users to switch users
3. Go through your pages and edit translations when needed, directly from the frontend

Please note that there is a limitation: the plugin uses an online service (Google, Microsoft or others) to automatically translate content at first. So you can only translate your website in languages available through the translation service. For instance, Bislama is not one of them.

Gotchas

So far, we only mentioned the translation of content directly published on web page, but there are more to consider:

• Document and reports
  Unless you produce your reports in multi languages, they are probably written in your main language and are not going to be translated by WordPress plugins.
• Images
  If you publish graphs or any image containing text, they will not be translated so you will need to re-create them for each language.
• Navigation menus
  Some sections of your site might need to get translated to keep them in the right context.