Best Free WordPress Multilingual Plugins for 2022
WordPress Multilingual Plugins: Looking to translate your WordPress website into multiple languages? These WordPress translation plugins are here to help to do the task and make your website multilingual.
1. WPML (Premium plugin)
WordPress Multilingual Plugin (WPML) is a popular translation plugin that can handle the translation needs of any website, be it a small blog or a huge corporate website. It helps translate content into 40+ languages and run them all off a single WordPress install. And because it allows you to place each language version on the same domain or sub-domain, it’s a good fit for multisites. You can also locate different translation versions on totally different domains.
WPML works equally well with both translation methods. It syncs with translation services for auto-translation. For this purpose, you can send your content right from your WordPress dashboard to the service you select, and the translated version is returned to you. At the same time, it supports manual translations via the WPML’s translation editor or using your own desktop software. Using the editor, you can also add specific language variants. Where WPML scores is in syncing menu translations, translating pages created with page builders, SEO features, integration with translation services, flexible language URLs and RTL editing. The plugin is compatible with most standard WordPress themes and plugins
2. Polylang
Polylang is an easy to use plugin. This plugin needs you to translate content by yourself without hooking up to any translation service. Therefore, it’s a good fit if you want to create and manage multiple language versions on your own or by hiring help. You can write post and pages, and create categories and tags the normal way, and then specify the language for each.
3. GTranslate
At least in its free version, GTranslate is much more basic than any of the other plugins on this list. Instead of creating a separate multilingual version of your site, it lets you add a drop-down widget with country flags where users can dynamically translate your site using Google Translate.
4. TranslatePress
Finally, TranslatePress is a comparatively new freemium translation plugin that sits kind of between something like WPML/Polylang and something like Weglot.
That is, it offers a lot of the convenience of Weglot, but inside your WordPress dashboard and for a one-time fee.
To translate your content, TranslatePress gives you a live front-end interface based on the WordPress Customizer. You can translate everything about your site, even down to Yoast SEO titles and descriptions and image alt text (with the premium version):
5. Weglot Translate
Weglot Translate uses an intuitive API to detect any content on your website, and translates it into one of 60 languages. The automatic translation serves as a base version, which you can manually edit using a Contextual Editor in your Weglot account. A helpful feature for content heavy sites is that you can mark phrases as reviewed. This avoids repeat translation and saves you time. To improve quality in translation, you can choose to go with professional translation services from Weglot.
6. Babble
Babble is an open-source and fast plugin that you can download for free from the GitHub repository. The authors claim that it works 20% faster than other plugins, that too with 40% fewer queries. After activation, enable the new language in the settings and then click on any page or post that you’d like to translate. The interface places the original content and a blank space side by side on the same screen to make translation easier. When you complete the translation, add the Language Switcher Widget to the sidebar. Users can then switch from one language to another.
7. Google Website Translator
Google Website Translator plugin allows you to use Google Translate API to translate your website content. It uses the default Google translate button which you can display anywhere on your website.
You can select the languages you want to show in the language switcher, which can be displayed using the sidebar widget or an inline shortcode.
The shortcode feature allows you to offer machine translations for specific pages as needed. The translated page will be visible to users when they select the language or the plugin detects it via their browser settings.
8. Transposh WordPress Translation
Transposh combines automated machine translations with manual human translations. You can also allow your website visitors to contribute translations with an easy to use in-context interface.
The plugin allows you to hire professional translation services to submit translations. Transposh’s automated translation feature supports Google, Bing, Yandex, and Apertium translation services.
9. WP Multilang
WP Multilang is – hence the name – a WordPress multilingual plugin with a full-blown feature to translate your pages in different languages. In short, with WP Multilang, you can translate posts, meta descriptions, menus, titles, widgets, multimedia files, you name it. Whatever you would like to translate, you can do it without a hitch by employing the power of WP Multilang. And you can give it a shot right away as it does not cost you a dime.
10. Multisite Language Switcher
As the name suggests, Multisite Language Switcher is a free WordPress Multilingual plugin that lets you switch between languages in an instant. With the WordPress multisite feature in combination with Multisite Language Switcher, you can now create your own hub of websites that you can run in different languages with ease. To get things moving forward, download the tool, install and activate it in your plugins section of your WordPress admin and you are ready to roll. For your information, you need to activate Multisite Language Switcher plugin in each blog individually.