Multilingual support for websites is in great demand because of the increase in worldwide traffic it brings, thus, leading to better SEO rankings, and popularity in general. It’s no secret that multilingual content does indeed have a positive impact on your website. Therefore, we’re going to talk about 5 such WordPress plugins, which could help you implement language translation on your WordPress site. All these plugins are Free to use (some have a Pro version as well).
But before proceeding further, let’s talk a bit about what happened to all those translation plugins, which were available on the WordPress repository before, but faded out rapidly. Most plugins used “Google Translate API” at it’s core, mainly because it was Free to use, and it was provided by Google i.e. the quality of translation is excellent and human-like. Because of the excessive use of their translation service, they made it a paid service last year, which means all those translation projects which relied on Google had no other option but to terminate, or start afresh using another alternative.
The following plugins are, however, free from such impositions, and do their job very well. In fact, these are the best free plugins for translation purpose.
qTranslate
qTranslate is among the most popular WordPress plugins, which let’s you create multilingual content with ease, and in an SEO-friendly way. The installation and configuration part is very simple. You could easily write your site content in different languages, from the same page, by just switching tabs. It also allows machine translation, which will automatically translate the content for your site users. The language support with this plugin is phenomenal, and you could easily add or remove languages from the back-end.
Transposh WordPress Translation
Another fine translation plugin, but uses a slightly different approach. It automatically translates the content for you, after which you could make amends to the portions with incorrect translation from the front-end, using a very neat and easy-to-use editor to modify the translated content on-the-go. It translates almost everything visible on a particular page, including comments, titles, meta tags, and even RSS feeds. 67 languages in total supported at the time of writing this article, including support for RTL layout.
Download Transposh WordPress Translation
GTS Translation Plugin
This plugin also uses a concept similar to Transposh WordPress Translation plugin. It supports over 30 languages at the time of writing. The content is first translated by developer’s translation server, which could then be modified manually by language moderators or editors from your end. The translated content is also cached on your site’s database, and thus, gets indexed by Search Engines. This ultimately leads to better traffic and SEO ranking.
Download GTS Translation Plugin
Multilingual Press
Multilingual Press works in a very unique way, compared to the other translation plugins. It requires WordPress Multisite platform to work, hence, a little more complicated to setup initially. What it does is, it duplicates your content, written in your site’s default language, and posts a translated copy on each WordPress site present on the same network, handling content for a particular language. Thus, you have a WordPress Multisite network with different sites for different languages. It doesn’t harm your site’s performance, by keeping the translated content separate from your original site. The back-end interface is easily accessible, and allows you to switch between translated content smoothly. If you’re using WordPress Multisite, this plugin is definitely worth a shot.
Stella Plugin
Stella Plugin is relatively a fresher among translation plugins available on the WordPress repository. It’s very simplistic, and requires minimal configuration from your side. Just like qTranslate, it allows you to write content in different languages, from the back-end content editor, without much hassle. You could easily add or remove more languages, and also configure different hosts for each language (a feature similar to the one provided by Multilingual Press). Widget to switch between languages from the front-end also provided. You could also enjoy this plugin on WordPress Multisite by purchasing the Pro version.
Let us know which translation plugin works best for you, in the comments section below. We’d love to have your feedback on the above plugins.
I downloaded and installed GTS and accidentally deactivated it. i deleted it and tried to re install but it asks me to register, however when I click on register it says “sorry a blog is registered with this name” how can I solve this
I think the developer of this plugin would be better able to assist you here.