14 Best WordPress Translation Plugins in 2020
When you put so much effort into crafting superb content on your WordPress website, it makes sense that you would want it to reach as many people around the globe as possible.
Although English is one of the most popular languages around the world and the one which is most popularly used on the Internet, you will need to provide your content available in other languages as well, if you want to grow your audience on a global level.
Thankfully, some excellent WordPress translator plugins can help make this task easier and can help you translate your content in high quality in many different languages.
Here are some tips on choosing the best WordPress translator plugin for your website.
How to choose the most suitable WordPress Translator Plugin
WordPress is the most popular website platform for creating websites of all kinds and in all languages.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t have a built-in feature, which automatically can translate the content into another language. But some highly efficient WordPress translation plugins can help translate the content from one language to another properly and in many cases, with minimal effort.
The multilingual plugins for WordPress are typically one of the following two types – self-translating and auto-translating.
The auto-translate WordPress plugins rely on the various online automatic translation services in order to convert your content into another language. They are quick and easy to use, but due to the nature of modern language, they can often fall short in providing good quality, meaningful translation.
The self-translate plugins for WordPress, on the other hand, require that you translate the content by yourself and add it to the additional languages to your website. This is a more time-consuming and more expensive method. Then again, there is no doubt, that the result of the self-translation will be better if you have found professionals or you yourself are proficient in the other language of your choice.
You will also need to find an SEO friendly WordPress translation plugin if you want to successfully reach a wider audience and increase your website traffic.
In case you are not targeted to a specific audience that speaks a particular language and want users from around the world to be able to access your content in their own language, financially, it makes sense to invest in an auto-translate plugin.
Here are the most popular of both types of WordPress translator plugins for you to choose from:
TranslatePress
With TranslatePress, you can easily and quickly translate all parts of the written content of your website, including the webpages, the posts, and your metadata, theme, and your plugins.
With this plugin, you can control each and every aspect of the translation process in real-time, thanks to the live preview option from the front-end.
With this plugin, you can either translate the content by yourself, or you can assign the translation to a certain user without giving them full access to the admin area.
You can use Google Translate or another web-based AI translator to translate the contents of your site, and then tweak any mistakes, and make corrections manually.
The plugin allows for easy switching between different languages for an easier and better translation process.
The TranslatePress plugin offers to generate SEO optimized URLs for your pages in any language, which will help boost your internet search rankings in other areas and countries too.
The price for using the TranslatePress plugin starts from $79 for a personal license. There is a free version that will allow you to translate a limited number of words in one language only.
WPML
The WPML plugin will help you translate your webpages, posts, themes, plugins, and more.
This is the oldest and one of the most popular WordPress translator plugins. Its interface is straightforward to use and to add, remove, and manage multilingual content from your website.
The plugin comes with various features, tutorials, documentation, and support to help you create the perfect multilingual website.
The plugin will connect you to reliable third-party translation services when needed, and they will translate and submit the content straight to your website.
With WPML, you can select which parts of your content you wish to have translated automatically and which part you prefer to translate by yourself or by a professional translator.
It’s pricing starts from $29 for a multilingual blog and $79 for a multilingual CMS.
Polylang
Polylang is another top-rated WordPress translator plugin that will allow you to create a perfect multilingual website.
With Polylang, you can translate the content from your website into any language you want, because it downloads and updates all the available WordPress language packs automatically.
This translator plugin is compatible with SEO WordPress plugins like Yoast SEO and All in One SEO. It will ensure that your translated content is SEO friendly, including all of the Html, Meta, and open graph tags.
You can choose one domain, one subdomain, or one directory per language.
Its interface is easy to understand and use. You can add the translations to your pages, posts, post types, widgets, and others.
Even though the basic version is free, Polylang will not translate your theme or plugins, though. Also, you will need to pay for eCommerce support if you need translations.
The pro version of the Polylang translator plugin starts at the cost of $99 for business and e-commerce sites.
Weglot
This translator plugin was first launched in 2015 and has quickly grown into one of the top preferred methods for translating WordPress websites and content.
It is unlike most other plugins because it resembles a SaaS solution that can be integrated into WordPress quickly and seamlessly.
You can configure most of the basic settings from the WordPress dashboard. At the same time, your translations are stored on the servers of the company on the cloud, so you will need to manage them there rather than directly on your WordPress website.
The plugin can automatically provide you with an AI machine translation of the entire website with a click of a button. And will add a language switcher tab automatically, so your website will be translated and ready for access in a matter of a few minutes.
You can also manage your translations manually through the Weglot cloud control dashboard and choose from a translations list option and a visual editor option to do, check and correct your translations.
The plugin can integrate with Yoast SEO and will ensure that the translated content, descriptions, and titles are also SEO friendly.
The basic version is free and will allow you to translate up to 2,000 words. The paid packages start from $99 per year for 1 language and up to 10,000 words. The most popular payment plan is the Pro plan, which is $490 per year and has an unlimited number of language translation options and a word count of up to 200,000.
Multilingual Press
This plugin uses WordPress Multisite, which means that you can run each of the languages of your choice on a separate website specially built for a specific country or language.
It has a language switcher widget, which will allow the visitors of your site to select their preferred language option and get redirected to the dedicated site for their language or area.
Multilingual Press can translate content in 174 different languages. It will also generate SEO-friendly content, URLs, and others, which will help improve the ranking of each language site in various regions and countries of the world and in searches perfomred in different languages.
The interface of the plugin is easy to use, so despite having the content spread on different websites, you can easily manage them all from a single dashboard. This makes the process very simple and quick, and you don’t have to go back and forth and change the content on each of the separate websites one by one.
Also, even if you disable the plugin, no content will be lost, and each of the separate sites will continue existing as it is.
The pricing for using this WordPress translator plugin starts from $199 for 1 year for a single license.
Lingotek Translation
Lingotek Translation is a cloud-based translation system which is built on the Polylang WordPress plugin.
This translation plugin for WordPress offers three types of translation services.
The first is machine translation based on the Microsoft Translator Tool and can be used for up to 100,000 characters.
The second one is community translation, which is provided by you for your users or employees, suing a pro text editor called Lingotek Workbench.
The third is a professional translation. This is the option for those of you with a sufficient budget for the professional translation provided by a network of professional translators selected by Lingotek.
The last one with the network of professional translators is the service that differentiates Lingotek translation from the other WordPress translator plugins.
The plugin will automatically transfer the content from your website to the cloud, where the professional translators can work on it. You can monitor its status in real-time. Once they are ready with the translation, the content will be transferred automatically back to your website.
xili-language
The xili-language plugin is available at the official WordPress plugin repository. It works only if you are using translation ready WordPress themes on your website.
The plugin can create Multilanguage content on any website, and at the same time, will change the language files of the theme you have chosen for your site to the specific language as well.
It is a developer-friendly plugin that allows for further personalizing of the behavior of your theme.
Google Language Translator
This is one of the lightest and easiest to use WordPress translator plugins. All you need to do is download and activate the plugin, and then choose the language of your website, and the list of languages you want it to be translated in.
Once activated, your content will be translated with the help of Google’s machine translator.
It is entirely free and can translate all content, pages, posts, tags, categories, plugins, and themes.
It works with WooCommerce Shop and is the most affordable and easy way to create a multilingual website in a matter of minutes.
GTranslate
GTranslate is powered by Google Translate and is among the most popular WordPress translate plugins.
It comes in a free and a paid premium version, with functionalities varying quite a bit between the two.
The free version of GTranslate can be used to translate the content of your WordPress website into a language of your choice dynamically.
It is easy to set up and activate. All you need to do is install it and choose the languages you would like to offer on your website, as well as where the language switch tab will be located. Once you are done, your website will be ready and accessible to visitors who speak other languages.
The problem with the free version is that you cannot manually correct the translations, nor can you rank your content in any of the other languages in Google.
With the premium version, you can manually adjust and correct your translations, edit your SEO data, and also create indexable and SEO friendly versions of your multilanguage website.
The premium GTranslate plugin is paid on a SaaS billing principle, so you will have to pay for as long as you want to continue using the service.
The GTranslate plugin allows for the translation of your content in 103 languages easily and quickly. The premium version gives you the power to integrate the translated pages with Google Analytics so you can measure your ranking and decide whether translating your content is delivering results.
The plugin is compatible with WooCommerce, Yoast SEO, and others.
You can choose whether you want to add a language switch, or rather have the plugin automatically translate the content based on the language of the user’s browser.
The paid plans start at $5.99 per month for one language and unlimited pages and words.
Loco Translate
Loco Translate is another widely popular plugin for translating for WordPress.
It will allow you to translate your themes and plugins directly into your browser.
It is a nifty solution for developers who are willing to widen the audience for their WordPress plugins and themes.
The plugin can translate all translation-ready themes and plugins and is very easy to use.
Multilanguage
This WordPress plugin allows visitors to your site to switch the language of your content to their preferences. The plugin supports more than 80 languages.
It comes with a choice of different language switch widgets that the visitors of your website can use to select the language of their choice.
You can also use the post editor and manually translate the content from your website using the Multilanguage plugin.
Goo Translate Widget
Based on Google Translate, this plugin offers a translation widget that you can add to your sidebar. You can track the performance of the widget, and it won’t save any of the translated text on your actual website.
Google Website Translator
This is another WordPress translator plugin which is based on Google Translate. It provides the option of choosing a shortcode or a widget for translating the content on your website.
The settings can all be stored in a single database, without the need for loading and saving external files. This feature makes it one of the fastest of the official plugins available at the WordPress repository.
Plus, you can exclude certain parts of your website which you don’t want to be translated.
The plugin will automatically detect the language of the user’s browser, or the visitors of your website can use a language switch to pick the language of their choice.
Transposh WordPress Translation
This WordPress plugin combines machine translation and human translation services. It also allows the visitors to your website to contribute with their own translations to your content.
With this plugin, you can easily find professional translation services to do the translations for you and submit the ready content once it is done.
The automated machine translation is done based on Google, Apertium, Bing, and Yandex.