A multilingual site is an excellent opportunity to reach a larger number of readers and make yourself known in other markets. If you cannot hire a professional translator, be aware that there are website machine translation solutions that may be suitable for certain uses.
How to configure this automatic translation in WordPress? In this article, I offer a free solution for many users, using DeepL and Polylang : The result obtained is so far of better quality than going through Google Translate and relatively “clean” on a technical level, in terms of compliance with good practices in international SEO.
1. Create a free DeepL API account
A few words about DeepL
If you don’t know DeepL yet, it is a tool for translate content from around thirty source languages to around thirty target languages, or language versions (American English, British English, etc.).
DeepL offers a generally higher level of quality than Google Translate but a more limited panel of languages. It has even been proven effective for the translation of scientific articles, just as it has been hailed for its relevance in a project to introduce a machine translation system within Swiss Post.
Like other solutions, DeepL trains computer programs capable oflearn to translate correctly from a wealth of resources available online. The program can then calculate discrepancies between its own translation and “commonly accepted” translations to correct itself. DeepL has the particularity of not learning from “everything and nothing” but from a database that has been preordered to select the best resources.
DeepL is available as a website, extension for your browser, software to download locally but also as an API. Put simply, the API allows you to “call DeepL” from another service of your choice. In this case, we are going to call DeepL from WordPress.
Obtain an authentication key for the DeepL API.
To do this, you simply need to create a free account on the site. The free formula already allows you translate up to 500000 characters per month. Knowing that an average French word has 4.8 characters, this quota allows you to translate more than 100,000 words per month.
If you have more substantial needs, there are DeepL Pro API, with a monthly fee of a few euros and then a price that depends on the number of characters translated. This professional formula is not binding, you can cancel each month.
Once connected to your account, go to the DeepL “Account” tab:
you will find your Authentication key a little further down the page (or be able to generate it). It is presented in the form of a succession of letters and numbers. We will need it to communicate WordPress and DeepL and configure automatic website translation.
2. Install the DeepL plugin in WordPress
The second step will take place directly on your website. To be able to do automatic translation in WordPress with ease, you need to install a plugin that uses the DeepL API. For my part, I chose Fluenx’s DeepL Pro API translation plugin. It’s far from perfect, but it does the job.
Simply install it from the Extensions > Add menu of your WordPress site, not forgetting to activate it afterwards. It will allow you to automatically translate content with a single click, preserving the format and/or code of your web pages (thus keeping, for example, the HTML tags that manage the format).
You can configure the extension from the menu Settings > DeepL Translation that appeared in his administration. First you have an “Identifiers” tab, in which you have to enter the famous authentication key obtained in DeepL and choose if you are using the free version (selected by default) or the paid version.
It is also in this tab that you will be able to track your “machine translation quota” spent each month.
So you have a “Translation” tab, where you can set a default language and select the languages to translate. Finally, you can choose the language level you want, more or less formal or colloquial.
In the “Integration” tab you have to choose where in WordPress the small website machine translation module It will be offered. You can leave the default location, then it will be displayed in articles and on pages, in the sidebar, in the same way as the small module that allows you to choose the category to which your article belongs.
For now, we’ll stop there on the DeepL front and focus on polylanga free plugin that allows you to manage a multilingual site on WordPress.
3. Configure the Polylang plugin for a multilingual site
Polylang has the advantage of being very simple and fast to configure, usable without losing hours of operation, which is very suitable in the context of a website machine translation project.
It also implements in a very clean way the essential elements for a good management of a multilingual site, such as hreflang tags (which allow search engines to be informed of the existence of alternative foreign language versions of a page) or even the menu of change of language.
Of course, there are more robust solutions, like WPML. You can use them instead of Polylang to make this tutorial.
You can install Polylang from the Extensions > Add menu in WordPress, remembering to activate it afterwards. Add a “Languages” menu in WordPress admin.
In Languages > Configure, you can add the languages you want to offer to your visitors.
In the “Settings” menu, you can choose url format foreign versions of the site, for example, to make sure they all include a language directory. This is also useful later for tracking performance, as you can isolate the traffic for each specific directory in your statistics.
Polylang makes new columns appear in the Articles, Categories or Tags menus. By clicking on the “+” next to French, it is possible to add a translation of the item in question.
4. Translate your theme and plugins
To have a fully multilingual site, you should consider the translation of your theme and your plugins. For this, there is the Loco Translate plugin to which I have already dedicated an article.
Also think about create menus for each foreign language (you can think about it later, after you have translated a database of content).
It’s just a matter of making sure the structure of the site itself is multilingual, so that later the articles and pages integrate harmoniously. In fact, the machine translation solution for websites that combines DeepL and Polylang will not translate all the menus and predefined texts of the theme with one click.
5. Translate articles with DeepL
Now that all of your basic structure is in place, here’s how translate content automatically with DeepL and Polylang:
- Open the original article (here in French) in a new tab.
Open the article in French - Add the foreign version by clicking the + for Polylang.
Add a translation with Polylang - Copy the content of the source article (in French in my example) to the destination article.
- Save the draft of the article. It will have a French title and content… but a URL to the correct language directory, like /en/ here:
Title of the article to be translated - Then use DeepL’s little module to start the translation of this content into the target language (English in my example) with a simple click on the “Translate” button:
Machine translation with DeepL
It’s instant, the title, URL and content are translated. The translation also preserves all HTML tags present in the article, be it formatting, title tags (h2, h3, etc.), hypertext links, etc.
So I advise you to adapt the SEO tags (title, meta description) and make a hand review content… because machine translation of websites still has certain limitations that I will tell you about now!
The limits of machine translation for websites
If you embark on the adventure of machine translation of websites, you have to be aware that it will not have the same quality as the work of professional translators. Therefore, it is not suitable for all uses, especially if you are a company and want to reach an international audience.
Even if the quality of DeepL is amazing and much higher than Google Translate, it does not equate to a “beautiful pen”. But above all keep in mind thatan automatic translator translates, but does not adaptunlike a professional.
For example, DeepL will translate “30 meters” to “30 meters”… but will not offer a conversion to “feet” to accommodate the preferred Anglo-Saxon unit of measurement. You will not rewrite sentences where you mention something very “French-French” so that they remain relevant in a foreign market.
Similarly, a website machine translation tool is not going to have seo visionwhat a professional can have: for example, among the different possible translations of the same expression, how to prioritize the one that will be most relevant in natural referencing according to the volume of research and/or the level of competence?
In summary, I advise you to limit the use of machine translation to situations where it is impossible to hire a professional translator, but is nevertheless necessary to offer your content in another language… and, ideally, to limit yourself to languages that you yourself masterin a “time saving” spirit.
Therefore, you can do the translation work with DeepL and review to refine, adapt and modify certain elements yourself. At balance time, a reasonable time spent, a reasonable cost but a correct translation where we make sure to protect ourselves from big mistakes!
Or translate with DeepL, then ask ChatGPT toimprove translation quality so that the text seems written by a native, managing the conversion of units of measure. It works quite well!
In any case, I hope this article will inspire you to new development horizons on your sites.
