MULTILINGUAL WORDPRESS WITH

POLYLANG

Teemu Suoranta 16.3.2016 Turku WordPress Meetup

Let’s talk about translations

• What kind of things need to be translated?

• What options do you have?

• How to setup Polylang?

• How to manage translations?

• Missing features and problems

So you are going to build a multilingual site…

• Complete vs partially translated sites

• Human vs machine translated sites

• Integrated vs independent sites

What needs to be translated?

• Main content: Pages, posts, categories…

• Plugins

• Widgets: Labels, content and visibility

• Navigations

• Text strings in theme (“Next »”, “Page not found”)

• Admin UI (for translators)

Multiple languages will make everything more

complicated

THE TRUTH

Translations from visitor’s perspective

• UI to change language (flags, list…)

• Content is separated by language

• Show content only in selected language

• Translations are linked: change a language, go to the translated page

• Automatically detect visitor’s language and redirect to that language

Building multilingual sites with WordPress

Choosing your tools• WordPress doesn’t really have a built-in solution

to have multiple languages at the same time

• There is a built-in way to translate WordPress, plugins and theme (.po & .mo)

• There’s no built-in UI to create and modify .po files

• Doing translations by multi-site or without any plugin will make you miserable

Plugins to the rescue• Machine translations

• Google Language Translator (≈90k)

• Bing Translator (≈2k)

• Human translations

• Polylang (≈100k)

• WPML (≈400k)

• qTranslate X (≈80k)

Introduction to Polylang

Polylang• Simple, open-source and free multilingual plugin

• Quick setup and easy to use

• Lightweight

• Translated content is saved as separate entries that are linked by (hidden) language taxonomy

• Translated posts are edited in their own editors

Things you need to translate

• Main content: linked translations and independent content

• Plugins: uses .po files

• Widgets: Set visibility, translate labels, uses .po files automatically

• Navigations: translate navigation menus (no sync)

Things you need to translate

• Text strings in theme: Translate in Polylang UI when strings are registered properly and/or use .po files

• Admin UI: Users can select their preferred language (from site’s languages)

• Media: Translatable or language independent

• Slugs: You’ll need this add-on from GitHub

Tools for developers• Example functionality

• Register, translate and retrieve strings

• Get language switcher

• Make translations or link translations in code

• Retrieve posts in language or translated versions

• Full documentation

Setup Polylang

Install and activate the plugin

Go to Setting > Languages and setup your main language

Language added, set content to default language

Go to settings tab

URL settings

foobargrill.dev/menufoobargrill.dev/fi/menufi.foobargrill.dev/menu

foobargrill.fi/menu

Synchronization settings (copying is not synchronizing!)

(Also decide which custom post types and taxonomies you want to be translatable)

Add more languages (or do it later)

Add language switcher (widget, function or navigation links…)

Tips for setup• Don’t make media translatable (unless you really have to)

• Avoid synchronizing if copying is enough

• Browser language detection might be bad idea if the main language isn’t English

• If you have used WPML you can import your multilingual content with WPML to Polylang plugin

• If you import data you can map content to right languages with WP All Import

How to manage multilingual content

Filter content in admin with admin bar language dropdown

Navigate to translations with icons:

plus icon - create new translation pen icon - edit existing translation checked icon - original language

New meta box in editor screen

String translations

Lingotek?

• A mysterious tab in Polylang settings

• Premium translation service that can be integrated to Polylang (with a Lingotek plugin)

• Machine or human translation services can be bought and delivered through it

Tips for management• Check out Getting Started from Polylang documentation

• It’s easiest to create translation when original post is complete (all the final meta data is copied)

• Register strings to be translated in Polylang: easy to use and add new languages

• There’s no perfect system to keep track of changes in all languages: you need to create habits and do checks

• Test before updating in production (d'oh)

Challenges with Polylang

Missing features• Cant’t translate options pages (including ACF

options pages)

• No built-in slug translation

• Unintuitive media translation (there’s a plugin though that syncs attachments)

• Doesn’t copy editor content to translation

Problems• UI will get messy if you have many languages

(roughly 10 or more)

• Not as thorough support for WooCommerce as WPML

• You can build working store with Hyyan WooCommerce Polylang Integration

• Maybe not for super duper complex multilingual stuff

• You might need to consider WPML (or Drupal?)

Summary

Polylang• Lightweight, free and open-sourced

• You can setup it without any technical knowledge and works with most of themes out of the box

• Complete multilingual solution: translate content, use admin in selected language, use .po files when available

• Might be clunky when there is loads of languages or the translation logic is really complex

But wait there’s more

• My co-organizer Janne Ala-Äijälä will tell more advanced stuff on WordCamp Finland 2016

• Subject: Leveling up your Multilingual WordPress Site

• More about workflow, weird characters, RTL support, translation performance…

Thank you!

• I’m Teemu Suoranta, web developer from Aucor and organizer of Turku WordPress Meetup

• You can follow me on Twitter @TeemuSuoranta

• I like to hear your horror stories from WPML