Do you want to translate your WordPress site? There are plenty of WordPress translation plugins that allow you to create multilingual content or provide machine translation of your existing content. In this article, we will show you the 9 best WordPress translation plugins for your website.
Choosing a Translation Plugin for WordPress
Most beginners do not know that you can install WordPress in your own language. You can use it to create content in your own language, or you can create a multilingual site.
While there are many translation plugins available for WordPress, they can be characterized in two main categories.
First, you have plugins that allow you to create multilingual content on your website. The main benefit of these plugins is the quality of your translations will be significantly better than any machine-generated online translation tools.
The second type of WordPress translation plugins are the ones that use online translation services to translate your contet. These plugins don’t require you to write content in multiple languages, but the quality of translations is not as good as it can be.
Having said that, let’s take a look at the best translation plugins available for WordPress.
1. Polylang
Polylang is a free WordPress translation plugin. It allows you to create multilingual content in as many languages as you need.
Polylang allows your users to choose their preferred language from their profiles, and it automatically downloads the respective WordPress language packs.
Polylang fully supports RTL languages and works with most WordPress themes.
See our guide on how to easily create a multilingual WordPress site for detailed instructions.
2. WPML
WPML is one of the most popular WordPress multilingual plugin. It is a paid plugin and comes with one year of premium support. WPML allows you to create multilingual websites.
You can translate all your posts, pages, custom post types, and menus into any language you want. It also connects you with professional translation services, so you can hire someone to translate your content.
3. qTranslate X
qTranslate X is another powerful free WordPress multilingual plugin. It is similar to Polylang and WPML in functionality. It offers an easy way to create multilingual content.
Users can switch languages while editing post to simultaneously work on content in different languages. It has a growing list of third-party add-ons, and most of them are free. They allow you to integrate qTranslate with various other platforms and plugins.
4. xili-language
xili-language is a free and powerful WordPress multilingual site plugin. Not only does it allows you to create multilingual content, it can also change your theme’s language files depending on the content language.
The plugin comes with comprehensive tools to help you build your multilingual site. It already supports most standard WordPress compliant themes, and it has addon to make it work with many other popular plugins.
5. Google Language Translator
Translating your content into different languages is time consuming and requires a lot of effort. That’s why many site owners choose to go for online translation tools like Google Translate.
Google Language Translator plugin provides an easy way to add Google Translate into your WordPress site. Take a look at our guide on how to add Google Translate in WordPress for detailed instructions.
6. Gtranslate – Google Translate
Gtranslate is another free Google Translate plugin for WordPress. It allows you to add a language switcher powered by Google to easily translate your web pages. It hides suggest better translation popup and Google Translate bar from the top.
Gtranslate also has an option to open the translated page in a new window. This way users can switch back and forth between original content and translated content. There are multiple styles for dropdown and flags that you can choose from.
7. Transposh WordPress Translation
If you were looking for an easy way to allow your users to translate content on your website, then Transposh can be the answer. It allows you to combine automatic machine translations with user translations. Your website visitors can simply select any text on a translated page and add their own translation.
8. Bing Translator
Similar to Google, Bing also offers an automatic translation tool. Bing Translator plugin uses Bing’s translator tool to automatically translate content on your pages. Maintained by Microsoft Open Technologies, this plugin hasn’t been updated for a while, but it works fine.
9. Goo Translate Widget
Another easy way to add Google Translate to your WordPress site is by using Goo Translate Widget plugin. This simple plugin adds a powerful widget to your WordPress site.
Simply drag and drop the widget to a sidebar, select your language, and then save widget settings.
That’s all, we hope this list helped you find the best translation plugins for your WordPress site. If you are looking to translate your WordPress theme, then checkout our guide how to find and translate a translation ready WordPress theme.
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Hi, I’m interested in setting up a multilingual discussion forum where each person would be able to read and contribute to the discussion in their own language. The forum content would automatically translate according to the language preference of the user.
Is this possible, feasible, how?
Thanks for any help
david
Hi,
thank you for this helping article. What I am missing though is on how to approach to this topic of translation of my blog as a beginner. It is fine to have an overview like this but the real pros and cons is what I need for a proper decision to choose the one which works for the individual blogging page.
Like is a plugin fast or slow, does it affect my webpages and how, which is best to use on a small slower server as an example. Which ones can translate menus and taxonomies and which not. Which one has a good User Interface and very important: which ones offer Support Services. From what I know up to now is, best is to choose one plugin and stay with it forever since a change causes some problems or leaves some “trash” behind. etc.
I would like to go with qTranslateX but I am thinking about getting WPML for my new lightweight blog. Have read that it was very heavy two years ago due to database queries but it is said that it is fixed now and has more speed. I definitely don’t want to use a plugin that slows me down since I am on a budget and not using big and faster server yet.
Thank you for your very good content on all your pages.
Cheers,
EFE
Thanks for the plugin suggestions. I’m using a custom static page as a homepage, I’m wondering which plugin can I use to support this. I installed Polylang and my static front page doesn’t work the way I coded it – the content displays, but all the code pertaining to the template no longer gets loaded. I wonder if there are free plugins which don’t have this issues or if there’s a way around it.
I need to choose a plugin for my web site This is a tourist business based in Namibia in Southern Africa. I would like the site to also display in Chinese. Anyone with suggestions can contact me please. Thank you.
Kind regards.
Jacques.
Great article for word press users, now they can use plugin of language and translation.
Thanks
sanjay
Hello! Do any of these plugins translate the language coming from another plugin? Eg. if I put a plugin for lets say horoscopes in english on my site, will any of these plugins detect the language of the horoscope plugin and translate it?
thanks in advance!
“The Ultimate WordPress Toolkit” does not tell the reader whether the Tool or Program is to be used for WordPress.com or WordPress.org.
Could you please tell me which program they are to be used for?
Thanks
John Hadfield
Hey John,
It is for self hosted WordPress.org sites.
I have a client that wants to translate his English site to Spanish and Chinese? Any suggestions? He would like to know the Three best plugins paid or Free?
I want to know how much time it takes to install and have these up and running? I have read the comments above, but time involved is not mentioned? I have never installed a translation plugin and need to give a fair quote for both parties.
Great article for WordPress users, now they can use Plugin of Language Translation.
You may also want to take a look at the GTS Translation plugin.
This plugin allows you to post-edit translations for increased quality. Supports over 30 languages.
Hi there,
I use Polylang. Works fine.
One question, though. How do you all cope with the subscribers to your site? I use Jetpack as my subscription program. In the ideal world, I would like to have my English subscribers to only get notified of the English new posts. And the same for the Dutch ones. Howevery, Jetpack can not do that. I checked with their customer support. So now, all my subscribers get notifications of both Dutch and English posts. This is certainly not ideal. I know I would opt out of mailing lists that send me ‘double’ info.
Who also has the same problem, and is there a solution?
Please advise.
Thanks in advance!
We will recommend you to use MailChimp or Aweber instead. You will need to create different lists that your users can subscribe to. You can either add dynamic signup forms for each language or you can add a signup form with checkboxes for different lists. Take a look at how we do it to create daily and weekly email newsletter.
Probably not working with comments since I’m getting doubled notifications…
Thanks for the advise! I will look into it.
Pfff, ever so complicated. So many features! I just want to notify my subscribers of new posts, in their prefered language only, that’s it. Any suggestions?
I have use Google Language Translator plugin and it is amazing how it changes languages and thanks to letting me know about more translator plugins.
I used Transposh for a while, and I liked it because its machine generated translations were able to be found in search engines (leading to a boost in international traffic), but I had to deactivate and remove it because it was causing loads of javascript errors.
Do any of the machine translation plugins mentioned above allow the translated material to be indexed by search engines?
I have exactly the same problem : Transposh stopped working in some cases (not all the text are translated, and on the post page, it does just no more work) – This was a good solution for me, as Katie says : the translations are indexed by search engines.
So, does anyone know a similar plugin which will allow to save the translations in the code, in order to be indexed by the search engines ? Katie, could you find a solution ? Thanks !
I believe it’s not the first time I make this comment on a similar article: please don’t mix multilingual plugins with automated translation plugins. You’re not contributing to clarify the concept of multilingual content to new users.
Make two different articles, one for each.
As to multilingual plugins, I believe MultilingualPress should definitely be mentioned. Your readers would also appreciate to know the differences between those plugins, regarding the way they’re implemented. An alert should be issued to the fact that some of these plugins, like qTranslate did, will leave behind a trail of extra content in your posts and pages in case you decide to use a different plugin.
Thanks for the feedback. We did try to keep the difference. The title of the article is translation plugins not multilingual plugins. We also kept the multilingual plugins and machine translation plugins apart in the list.
Do not use qtranslate people its never updated and can seriously screw up your website!!
Choose wisely, because mostly it is very difficult to switch to an other plugin later!
An other option for a multilingual blog would be a multisite installation. There is a interesting plugin supporting this setup: Multilingual Press (recently the pro version got free, but you have to pay for support if needed)
This approach is a very clean and would still work after removing the plugin. As disadvantage you need to duplicate all media then, since there is no central media-library. It is not very easy to use in shops too, since it is difficult to synchronize inventory between different sites. Finally, some plugins do not support multisite installation (or ask you to buy a pro version, like SNAP)
I recommend everybody to forget about the plugins that translate texts with the help of Google or Bing. The results are often terrible and just wrong. The fault lies not in the plugin itself but in the poor results that are delivered by Google or Bing. Whenever I come across a text that has been translated automatically, I go through the process of 1) wondering about the confusing gibberish and b) search for the article in its native language.
I guess you have forgotten Genesis Translations by Remkus de Vries.
It’s a simple plugin that translates perfect to danish for example.
Though it is made for Genesis Framework, but if one is using this, it is a very good plugin.