Creating a website can be tricky, even if you just do it in English. There’s SEO, creating a steady stream of content, responding to interactions on your website, and also selling your products and services. Doing all of that can take a lot of time, and if you have an international audience you might find yourself doing everything, but in two different languages!
If the idea of painstakingly translating every single page of your website into multiple languages sounds like a nightmare, then you don’t need to worry. If you used WordPress to create your website, then you can effortlessly turn your website into a multilingual powerhouse. Here’s how to do it.
First, Focus On Human Translation
While it might be tempting to focus on results that promise automatic machine driven translations of your articles and content, you want to put your efforts into getting human translations and interactions whenever possible.
While auto translation software has come a long way, there are still a lot of little things that it can miss. As we all know, human language has nuances and slang that computers really struggle with.
And if your translation has too many mistakes, most people will start to think less of your content. So make sure that whatever you do to translate your site has some type of human element, because it will make everything work a lot better.
Use Plugins
One of the easiest ways to translate your website is to use WordPress plugins. These are applications that you can install and that are designed to work with your WordPress website, and they come with their own sets of instructions. Most plugins will allow you to translate your website, automatically making translations on every single page.
Certain plugins, such as TranslatePress or the Weglot website translation plugin, also allow you to translate all the articles you want at the same time, without needing to create copies of each page and having to translate them individually.
Additionally, plugins can also translate the backend of your website too, so you aren’t just translating what your customer sees. In addition you are also translating what your customers don’t see, while allowing all your SEO to work for both your English and your international customer groups.
That means more attention and more sales for you, because if your customers can read your website they can certainly make some purchases from it!
Focus On Editing, Rather Than Translating
One of the best things you can do to quickly and effortlessly translate your website is to allow a plugin or other service to translate your entire website in one fell swoop.
Then you can go in and simply translate all of the mistakes or inaccuracies that the translation software got wrong. It’s one of the easiest ways to translate a massive amount of text, instead of typing and translating it out yourself.
You might have to deal with a lot of silly mistakes from whatever translation software you use, but it won’t be too terrible. Then you can get the multilingual versions of the website up even quicker, and start marketing to your audience.
More Languages Doesn’t Always Mean More Work
Hopefully you know that translating your website into several languages doesn’t have to be a massive time commitment. With some plugins and a few hours of work, you can very easily create a multilingual website on WordPress.
Then all you need to do is set up a button where your customers can determine what type of language they want to see your website in and everything will be all good to go.
