How to translate a WordPress website content automatically using Linguise?

Linguise is a neural network-based content translation solution for websites. The neural network machine translation is based on modern machine learning algorithms. Its combination with WordPress is a perfect match because the CMS has no native multilingual system and, let's face it, traditional translation plugins are a nightmare to configure, and still offer questionable results. In this post we'll study WordPress' automatic translation and I'll share some of our experience translating JoomUnited.com!

Why would you want to translate your WordPress website?

Today, no matter what the nature of your site, it has become essential to optimize it for an international audience.

Internet users' expectations of the user experience are always increasing: ease of use, speed and even instantaneous access are no longer desirable, but essential elements to enrich the user experience. To provide an ever more seamless experience, you need to minimize the number of barriers between the user and their access to your content, whether it's a product, a blog, a multimedia element, or the language.

That's why allowing your international users to cross the language barrier is a huge asset and gives them the experience of your site as you designed it. With translations, you can open your website to new markets without compromising on the user experience.
There is, of course, an entry barrier, which is the financial cost of translating a website, but the natural SEO boost of a multilingual translation is amazing. Indeed, the search results are highly influenced by your location and your browser language. Just take a look at the search results for a plugin name with a French location.

But we'll come back to that in detail later.

What's the best way to translate your website?

All the translations are made available instantly using the Google and Microsoft APIs, the Linguise algorithm and a cache server.

What are the main advantages of Linguise over human-only translation plugins?

There are many advantages of using Linguise's global automatic WordPress translations. The main problems with translations are the price and the time of deployment. Humans take a long time to translate, and deservedly charge a lot for their work. Automatic translation edges out humans in both aspects: it is both faster and comparatively cheaper than manual translation.

Best of all, installing Linguise on a website with 80 languages takes around 15 minutes. That means a full installation and configuration that includes:

• Setting up the languages and adding the language switcher to your website
• Translating all the WordPress content
• Translating all 3rd party plugin content
• Optimizing the main SEO content like meta information, page titles and multilingual sitemaps

On the other hand, with a classical translation plugin, like WPML or TranslatePress, it would take days to carry out these tasks. And could you imagine a human looking for and translating the hidden, meta information, or a sitemap? With Linguise, you could do all that for 80 languages with minimal maintenance.

Compare the prices for a website with 100 multilingual pages of 1000 words each:

Linguise can translate any WordPress theme and plugin

All the translations happen in the background automatically and you can edit them right away if need be! All you have to do is navigate to Linguise's dashboard and use the Translations, Urls Translations or the Live Editor to fix or refine translations. Keep reading to learn more about manual edits to translations further down.

What's the difference between Linguise and Google Chrome's translations?

Linguise is way more than a simple neural network machine translation

The second risk is not a critique of the overall quality of Google Translate translations. Nor is it a critique of any other automatic translator on the market, including DeepL, Yandex, Bing Translate and so on, which generally have a good quality.

In fact, since the introduction of machine learning and neural networks, these tools have made significant progress in quality. The quality of translations can reach 90% when compared to human translations, at least on the main language pairs on the market, such as French and Spanish.

On the other hand, it's always a good idea to check all your translations and modify those that are imperfect. Despite the constant improvement in the potential of machine translation, certain translations would still benefit from a human revision. Automatic translations are made by machines, and machines make mistakes too!

Technical terms, puns and cultural references all fall into this category. Even long and complex sentences can stump translation tools. If your site contains them, you should have your translations reviewed by a professional translator - or check them yourself, if you are proficient in the translated languages.

What, then, is the difference between these services and Linguise? Linguise goes beyond simple machine translation and allows you to manage your translations according to your needs from a dedicated and easy-to-access interface. Plus, Linguise takes care of the translation models and all the HTML specifics of a website, such as hyperlinks, span tags, and hidden elements, like the images' alternate text.

Linguise impresses you straight from the dashboard. Sleek and modern, Linguise's dashboard places the essentials in one page, showing your plan, translations and traffic in one, simple-to-navigate page. From the Linguise dashboard you'll get access to:

• A complete and editable list of all translated strings on your site
  
• A visual, live editor from which you can edit your translations directly on your web page
• A tool to give access to translators, by language
• A tool to apply global rules to translated content

Customizable WordPress language selector

The design of your site is part of its identity. When an extension adds a visible item to your page, such as an instant chat window, shopping cart, button, or popup, it's always in your best interest to ensure its visual consistency with other elements of your site.

When Linguise is installed on your WordPress site, a language selector is ready to be added anywhere with a simple shortcode.

Despite the relative visual neutrality of this default button, you'll probably want to be able to assimilate it to the visual style of your site. With Linguise, it's easy! Just go to your WordPress administration interface and click on Linguise, and then Advanced. Scroll down to find plenty of customization options. You can go even further in the design of your language selector by adding custom CSS.

A multilingual SEO that works

As a website owner, your search engine ranking is probably high on your list of priorities. With a multilingual site, you need to worry not only about being well positioned in the main language, but also in all the languages in which you translate it. In other words, you need to optimize your search engine strategy for all languages.

The SEO problem is even more complex because international Internet users do not necessarily use the same search engines. Bing, Baidu and Yandex, among other search engines, enjoy different popularities depending on demographics, such as age groups or countries. Even Google, arguably the best-known engine, ranks sites differently based on the user's geographic location and browser language.

The ideal solution for your multilingual SEO is the one that optimizes your blog in all languages, on all relevant search engines and all the geographical areas of your users, at the same time. Linguise is one of the extensions that automatically does this work.

As soon as it's installed, the Linguise plugin translates all the metadata on your site, including the titles and descriptions of your pages, which are crucial for their referencing. Linguise also adds hreflang tags, or alternative URLs, which tell search engine robots, which crawl your website, in which languages your pages exist, so they can rank them too. Last but not least you can translate your sitemap into all the languages you've activated on your website.

Edit your translation by... clicking on it!

The Live Editor is simply spectacular. You just need to login to your translation dashboard, select a language to edit, and then click on any HTML element from the front-end of your website to edit it! A dynamic element, like a checkout payment page, is editable too. This is how you would edit a translation for a blog title in Spanish:

 Invite translators to edit your content

If you want to hire a translator to review your content, you can use the language translator account and language manager sub-accounts that come with Linguise.

The translator will have access only to the front-end editor and the language you've chosen for them. On the other hand, the language manager will have access to all languages and the rules we've just mentioned earlier.

JoomUnited experience: deploy 20 languages in 10 minutes

If you followed the instructions to the end, your site is now multilingual. This is already a good start to increase your conversion rate and break into foreign markets. On JoomUnited, in just 6 months we've increased our traffic by 40% just by using Linguise.

As a web design company, translating your site is only the first step towards realizing your international potential. As already discussed, one of the advantages of translating your site with Linguise is its compatibility with any other extension, including WooCommerce, the flagship extension for e-commerce on WordPress.

Making your site multilingual broadens the horizons of your web presence and the Linguise extension for WordPress provides you with a reliable and easy way to do so.