What can be done easily and what will you struggle with gTranslate in WordPress

Table of Content

1. Overview

2. Proxy Localization

3. What can we achieve with gTranslate?

   1. For beginners, you can achieve these easily within 30 minutes:

   2. For beginners, additional help is needed to achieve:

4. Conclusion

Overview

Malibu Beach Inn is a hotel located in Malibu on the California coast that I really love. The hotel has a fantastic ocean view and a really delicious restaurant. I could see visitors from all around the world when I was there. According to the comments on travel websites and the web analytics service on Similarweb, the second-largest visitor volume base of Malibu Beach Inn is Germany and Italy. There are also plenty of Chinese people recommending this hotel on social media. Many Chinese people got interested, but there are also a good number of comments like: "I would love to go on my trip to Los Angeles next month, but is there a way I could reserve given that my English is poor?" or "How can I reserve the restaurant? I cannot understand the website."

When I saw these potential customers missing out on this perfect vacation hotel because of language issues, I felt deep pity not only for the visitors but also for the hotel. Malibu Beach Inn does have a great and informative website, but it only supports English. Visitors might only understand images in an English-only website and cannot catch critical information such as reservation methods, hotel amenities, or room setups.

It is obvious to see the benefit to localize the hotel's website. It can make it much easier for website visitors to decide on making a reservation, as well as gain more exposure and advertising opportunities in search engines in the target language, through methods like SEO.

The question now is: if there is a way to roughly localize the website in a cost-friendly and beginner-friendly method? There are plenty of options, but one of the simplest approaches is to use Proxy Localization.

gTranslate Dashboarad

gTranslate settings in WP

Proxy Localization

gTranslate is the proxy translator I chose for this project. With its help, most people can complete a rough localization for a website within 30 minutes. In traditional website translation, users need to first export all text to XML Localization Interchange FileFormat, then translate line-by-line in an external editor, and finally import it back and merge it into the original website. In the proxy server interface, the to-be-translated text on a website can be directly selected and edited in real-time, which avoids issues like:

• Complicated configuration, export, and import procedures

• Display errors caused by text getting too long or too short

• Chaos in the translation document when multiple languages come into play

In addition, most proxy translation services like gTranslate also support on-click rough machine translation for multiple languages.

Based on the reasons listed above, as well as that the Malibu Beach Inn website has a small number of pages, a relatively low text word count below 10000, and a simple structure, I opted for gTranslate in this project, one of the hot providers of proxy localization.

What can we achieve with gTranslate?

For beginners, you can achieve these easily within 30 minutes:

• Add different languages

• Add a language selector to the website

• Perform simple edits to the translation results

• Perform machine translation for multiple languages with one click

For beginners, additional help is needed to achieve:

What can be done in the previous block is likely the best result you can get without some HTML background or practical experience with WordPress or its plugins, especially if you only want to get basic support for different languages and do not wish to spend another 30 hours learning the details.

However, with your business empire expanding over time, the following functionalities will be necessary at some point in the future, and you would need to find a professional localization specialist to configure the project and eliminate bugs.

Image Localization

Many proxy localization service providers will declare that they support image localization in advertisements, including gTranslate. However, most of these "support" is incomplete and unhelpful. The real and complete image localization contains technology from multiple desktop publishing and website programming.

For example, it actually takes a very complicated procedure to accomplish an English-to-Chinese localization for the image above, including: creating corresponding Chinese images based on the original ones with image-processing software; uploading Chinese images to WordPress and obtaining the URL; finding the location of the original image in the original HTML code; substituting the URL in the proxy translation interface; fixing lots of UI bugs, and more. It is likely to result in errors or unstable products if done by someone unfamiliar with the process, especially when the number of images gets higher (25+ images from all languages together).

Localization of other plugins on the website

gTranslate often conflicts with other WordPress plugins. Be prepared to face many display bugs if your website is using plugins that change the interface, such as popular plugins including elemontor, Gutenberg theme, smart slider for image quality, or Popup maker for simple pop-up additions.

In addition, many plugins will store cookies in your browser to do its job, and these cookies may block you from fixing the bugs. For example, when you are fixing the conflicts between the popup plugin and the gTranslate plugin, you have to clear cookies and cache every time to check if the fix is successful.

Hint: It is better to use browsers with built-in incognito mode to test for this issue.

Professional translator management and access controls

If your website is only 4-5 pages in size and only needs to be translated to 1-2 languages(e.g. English and your other spoken languages), then you might be able to take on the text translation workload yourself.

When you have more content on the website, imagine these:

1. The website already stores 20 product info and blogs, or

2. You want to translate it to a language you do not speak, or

3. You do not want to keep using unreliable machine translation and want it done accurately, or

4. The website content updates very fast (every 3 days or so) and you are too busy with the rest of the business to deal with its localization immediately

Under any of these scenarios, it would be best to work together with professional translators. gTranslate has a module for collaborators, which allows you to add accounts with the role and access of either administrator or translator. It can also help manage the visible target language pages to translator accounts. With these simple configurations, you can guarantee that translators for different languages will not interfere with each other, nor will they accidentally change core settings.

But we will also need more detailed categorizations and more automated procedures in many circumstances, such as task assignment, post-editing, alerts to translators for newly published content, image localization as mentioned before, and more. These will require more professional localization tools such as WPML and qTranslate XT.

Conclusion

If your website is simple in structure, low in content volume, and does not contain images that require translation, Proxy localization will be a great and beginner-friendly option. Users will not need to get familiar with website programming languages, APIs, or complicated translation management systems (TMS). Several simple button clicks will result in a readable multi-language website.

The downside is that using proxy localization will make the entire process of localization depends on the gTranslate plugin, slowly pulling the user away from an organized document management system and efficient workflows. When the business eventually grows large enough, most users will still require tools with more complete features and functionalities.

Up until now, your thought might be: "hmm...Let me start with the simplest tool, and maybe switch to the more professional ones when I have the money for it."

Would you reconsider that decision when the fact is that multi-language proxy translation costs ~$15/month, WPML costs $99/year, and current proxy translation providers do not fully support content exports and migrations?