How To Make a Multi Language Website

I’ll be using two separate approaches to translate website in more than two languages.

Why you should have a website in more than one languages i.e. multilingual website?

There are several reasons why you should have a multi-language website. Few of them are mentioned below.

1. English will be a minority language in the next 10 years

The internet started as an English speaker and searching inventions and hence, it was dominated by English speaking users, website and bots. Now, the time is changing tremendously. Daily with new PC inventions and internet usage, please from New Zealand to Nigeria are preferring to buy machines in their own native language installed. So, of course, they will be searching the stuff in their own language.

Very soon, English will be added in the minority language list. So, today if you start a blog or write content in your own language, that will be beneficial in the upcoming decade.

2. New Customers Attention

On the internet, the content is available in the English language mostly but when a new customer searches for a product or an article in his own language then you can get attention from those people who are not-English speakers.

3. Trust

For many people, there is always an issue with trust when it comes to buying products online, mostly if they feel the product they are trying to buy is in a language which they even don’t understand.

Offering a language to people which they understand properly to make them feel secure and they know obviously what they are buying, from whom and how to buy.

1. You need to have an existing website with some content. If you don’t have a website yet, learn how to make a WordPress website today.

So, firstly download the WPML WordPress translation plugin from wpml.org and download it somewhere on your PC.

You must be having few zip files downloaded like WPML Translation Management, WPML String Translation, SitePress Multilingual CMS.

These are the three zip packages that you need to translate your website quickly.

• Go to WordPress dashboard and jump to “plugins”. Hit add new button.
  
• Upload the WPML Sitepress multilingual cms plugin first and activate it.
  
• Upload and install other two plugins i.e. WPML Translation Management and WPML String Translation.
• Activate all the WordPress Translation Plugins.
  

Alright so now your website is loaded with the translation plugin. It’s time to set up the plugin to make it work for automatic translation.

Before going ahead, a few more basic settings needs to be done to translate the website automatically.

1. Who will translate this website?
   Of course, you “the admin” but you must have to let the WPML plugin know about it. So, in order to do that, go to WPML and then Translation Management.
   Now, you can see four checkboxes to choose from. Select, the first one i.e. “only myself ([your-username]) and hit continue button.
   In this way, you will be assigned as the person who holds the privilege to translate the entire website content.
   
2. Now, in the next step, it will ask you to choose the translation editor. So, choose the “WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor” and hit continue again.
   
3. At last, click on the “Done” button in the next step.

Automatic & Manual Translation

In order to translate the website content automatically, go to the pages in your WordPress dashboard.

Click on the “+“ icon below each of the country flags.

“+” means that the current page is not translated in the secondary language. So, once you click on the “+” icon, a separate page will open i.e. the advanced WPML translation editor for automatic and manual translation of the page’s content.

In my example, I am clicking the first “+” icon for Privacy Policy page’s translation to the French version.

This page will be opened which is the advanced translation editor of WPML where you can either translate the each and every section’s content with just one click.

At the very top, there is a blue “Translate Automatically” button. Just click on it and a pop up will come up with two select options radio buttons.

Choose the second option “Mark sentences as complete after automatic translation without additional review” and hit “Translate” button.

This will take a couple of seconds to make your website content translated version available and then you have to click on the green check icon to verify whether the translation is 100% correct or not.

In case, if you think the machine translation is somewhere wrong, just add your own text and hit the green check icon again.

Once you verify that all the translated text is correct, click on the Finish button at the bottom right corner and this will take you back to the WordPress’s dashboard pages section.

So, you have successfully translated the Privacy policy page’s English text to French.

In the same way, translate the content to other languages.

WPML is the best WordPress translation plugin to make a multi-language website within few minutes. Though it is a premium plugin but works great with blogs, eCommerce and business sites.