This however is not always as straightforward as it should be. Different WordPress translation tools have different approaches when it comes to translating slugs for categories, custom taxonomies, or terms. It’s quite easy to get confused when joggling with multiple translation interfaces for different types of content, while also having to worry about compatibility issues with your theme or favorite page builder.

In this tutorial, we’re going to use TranslatePress, a beginner-friendly WordPress translation plugin, that lets you translate all your taxonomy slugs in one place, using an intuitive translation interface that looks like this:

It also works out of the box with any theme or plugin, including WooCommerce or page builders, like Elementor. Using it you can translate every content on your site, page by page, using a visual translation editor.

Let’s dive in…

Translating WordPress Categories, Custom Taxonomies & Terms using TranslatePress

WordPress taxonomies are useful for grouping things like blog posts or custom post types (events, books, movies etc.) together. Two popular taxonomies used on a regular basis are “Categories” and “Tags”. Users can add tags to their WordPress posts along with categories.

A custom taxonomy could be something like “Genre” for a “Movies” custom post type. In this case the “Genre” taxonomy terms might include: “Action”, “Romance”, “Thriller” and more. Obviously, the possibilities here are many for grouping your content.

TranslatePress makes it really easy to translate any taxonomy or term slug.

Using its URL Slug translation interface you can:

• Translate Taxonomy Slugs
• Translate Term Slugs
• Translate Post Slugs (this includes pages and custom post types)
• Translate Post Type Base Slugs
• Translate WooCommerce Slugs (shop base, product category, product tag)

In this tutorial, we’ll focus on the first two points, but for a complete guide on translating any URL slug in WordPress you can check out this tutorial.

Getting started with TranslatePress

Installing TranslatePress on your website is a straightforward process. First, choose your preferred plan and purchase the premium version of the plugin. The reason you’ll need the pro version is because we’ll be using the SEO Pack add-on, available with any of the paid licenses.

So, after purchase, go to your account page and download your copy of the pro plugin.

If this is the first time you’re using TranslatePress, you’ll also have to download the main plugin and install both zip files on your site from the Plugins area.

To translate categories, taxonomies, and terms, you’ll also need the SEO Pack add-on (included in any TranslatePress premium version). You can activate it from the Addons tab in the TranslatePress Settings.

Next, under TranslatePress Settings make sure to add a translation language you wish to make your site available into. We’ll pick “Spanish” for this example. The setting page also contains options like customizing your language switcher, but we’ll leave them set to default for now.

Make sure to save the settings and then click Translate Site.

You’ll be prompted with a visual translation editor (similar to the Customizer) where you simply click to select a certain text, then enter its translation in the left sidebar. Hit Save and you’ve just translated your first piece of text. Simply repeat the same process for every string on the page and you’ll have all your content translated.

To speed things up you can use automatic translation (TranslatePress integrates both Google Translate and DeepL machine translation services) and after simply modify what hasn’t been translated properly.

Now that you’ve seen how TranslatePress visual translation interface works, let’s start translating our taxonomies and terms.

Translating WordPress Category or Custom Taxonomy Name

Using the visual translation interface from TranslatePress simply navigate to the page where the taxonomy name appears, click the pencil icon to select the text, then enter its corresponding translation.

After you’ve translated a taxonomy name once, it will automatically change all over the site, showing the corresponding translation. So you only need to translate any taxonomy or term once.

Besides the actual name, another important thing that we need to translate is the taxonomy and term slug.

Translating WordPress Taxonomy Slugs

The best way to translate all taxonomy and term slugs from one place is to switch from the Visual Editor to the String Translation tab (lower left).

Here you can select the type of URL slugs you’re looking to translate using the mini tabs, as well as filter and search for specific ones.

We’ll select the “Taxonomy Slugs” tab and translate each taxonomy into Spanish. As you notice, the first one is the default WordPress taxonomy: “category“. Simply click on it, enter its translation, hit Save, and move to the next taxonomy.

Translate WooCommerce Product Category & Tag

Using this interface you can also translate WooCommerce product categories, as well as product tags. We’ll go ahead and translate “product-category” taxonomy into Spanish.

You can translate any type of category (including custom ones) from TranslatePress’ URL String translation interface.

Translating WordPress Term Slugs

Now that we translated all taxonomies, we can proceed to translate term slugs. Clicking on the Term Slugs tab will list all the terms. The interface will also show you the corresponding taxonomy for that specific term.

Translating any term slug is done exactly the same way. You select a term, enter its Spanish translation in the translation sidebar and click “Save“.

Once you’re done translating everything, simply close the URL Slug Translation interface and browse the front-end of your website in Spanish. You’ll notice that all taxonomies and term slugs have been properly translated.

Start Translating WordPress Taxonomies with TranslatePress

Using TranslatePress along with its <a href="http://SEO Pack add-on you can translate WordPress taxonomies and terms all in one place, using a familiar interface.

You start by translating the actual name of each taxonomy and term, then using the String translation interface you’ll be able to translate their URL slugs as well.

The URL Slug translation lets you translate all slugs (posts, pages, CPTs, WooCommerce products), including taxonomies and terms. You can easily browse, filter, and search for certain slugs. You’ll have all slug translations in one place so that you won’t leave anything out and make sure everything is properly translated.

TranslatePress Multilingual

TranslatePress is the easiest way to translate your WordPress site. It's fast, won't slow down your website, works with ANY theme or plugin and it's SEO friendly.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

Do you still have questions about translating categories and taxonomies in WordPress? Let us know in the comments!

If you found this post helpful, please check out our YouTube channel, where we constantly upload short & easy-to-follow video tutorials. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter to be the first to know each time we post.

The post How to Translate Categories & Custom Taxonomies in WordPress appeared first on TranslatePress.

That’s when multilingual search comes into play.

In this tutorial, we’ll go through how to enable multilingual search for your translated website or multilingual E-commerce store. All without writing a single line of code or messing with the default WordPress search functionality.

The process is really straightforward and all that’s needed to translate your site in multiple languages as well as enable multilingual search is TranslatePress, a powerful WordPress translation plugin.

TranslatePress Multilingual

TranslatePress is the easiest way to translate your WordPress site. It's fast, won't slow down your website, works with ANY theme or plugin and it's SEO friendly.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

Ready to learn how to set it up? Let’s dive in.

Multilingual Search in WordPress

Depending on the translation tool you’re using, the ability to support multilingual WordPress search can be quite challenging.
That’s because in dealing with different types of content: posts, products, pages, custom post types or custom fields, displaying the relevant search results (in the selected language) is tricky.

Due to the way it’s built, TranslatePress doesn’t care how your content was created. It could be a page built with a page builder like Elementor or a WooCommerce product, you’ll be able to translate it visually, directly from the front-end.

And once installed, TranslatePress will automatically make the default WordPress search multilingual.

Let’s see how this works.

Making WordPress Search Multilingual with TranslatePress

TranslatePress makes sure all your translated content is searchable by enhancing the default WordPress search functionality.

Installing TranslatePress and choosing translation languages

To get started, simply install and activate the free TranslatePress plugin from WordPress.org.

Once you’ve activated the plugin, go to Settings → TranslatePress to choose the language(s) that you want to use.

First, choose the Default Language, which is the language that your website content currently exists in. Then, add the new translation languages that you want to offer. We’ll add “Spanish” for this tutorial.

With the free version of TranslatePress, you can translate your content into one new language, while the premium version of TranslatePress lets you use unlimited languages.

Under TranslatePress Settings you can also configure a few other important things like adding and customizing a front-end language switcher. By default, the plugin will add a floating language switcher button in the bottom-right corner of your site which follows you as you navigate the site.

Click “Save Changes” and you’re ready to start translating.

Translate Your Website Content

All that’s left now is to start translating your website content. For this simply click the “Translate Site” tab, or navigate to the front-end of your website and click the “Translate Page” icon from the WordPress toolbar.

This will open up a visual translation editor (similar to the Customizer), where you see a live preview of your website content on the right and a translation sidebar on the left.

To translate a certain text, simply hover over it, click the pencil icon and enter its translation. Hit Save and you’re done.

The translation is updated instantly. You simply repeat the same process for all the remaining strings on a page, until all your site content is translated. As simple as that!

Besides just text, TranslatePress lets you translate a wide variety of elements: from images with text, sliders to forms and popups. You can use the same visual translation approach for all of them.

For a more step-by-step approach check out this guide on How to Create a Multilingual WordPress Site.

To speed things up, you can start by enabling Automatic Translation under TranslatePress settings, using either Google Translate or DeepL. Once enabled, each page of your site will be automatically translated the first time it’s visited.

It’s important to know that the automatic translation of any content using TranslatePress is done just one time, which helps keep your costs down and reduces page load time.

The plugin then stores the automatic translations in your database and loads them when needed. No other API calls to the automatic translation services.

After all your website content has been automatically translated, it’s highly recommended that you manually refine the translations that sound off or are out of context.

To find out more about setting up automatic translations, check out How to Automatically Translate Your WordPress Site (fast and with minimal costs).

Add a WordPress Search Form to your Multilingual Website

Now that you have your site fully translated all that’s left is to see the multilingual WordPress search in action.

For this, we’ll start by adding a standard WordPress search form to it. The simplest way to add a search form to your site is by using the Search widget that WordPress offers.

You can add this to any sidebar defined by your theme.

We’ll go ahead and add a search form to our blog, to make it really easy for people to find articles on topics they’re interested in.

Here’s what it looks like:

Now, let’s browse the blog in Spanish and try searching for a Spanish keyword to see the results. We’ll search for “marca” which is the corresponding Spanish translation for the English “brand”.

As you noticed only Spanish content is displayed, that either contains the “marca” keyword in the title or content of a post, page, product etc.

That’s it. With the help of TranslatePress, the default WordPress search form will display only content in the selected language, relevant to the searched keyword.

Multilingual WooCommerce Search

The same thing applies if you’re building a multilingual WooCommerce store and are looking for an easy way to let visitors search for products in their language.

Making products and product descriptions available to your customers in their native language is a great way to boost conversions and increase revenue.

Multilingual WooCommerce Product Search

If you’d like to narrow down the multilingual search results to products only, you can easily achieve this by using the Product Search widget which WooCommerce offers.

Again, TranslatePress will make sure the product search results shown are in the selected language and relevant to the search term used.

By using the product search to look for products related to “marca” (“brand” in Spanish), we’ll get only the relevant products – in Spanish.

Does Multilingual Search work with any WordPress Search Plugin?

As you’ve seen by now, TranslatePress will enhance the default WordPress search or WooCommerce product search making them multilingual ready. But what happens when you use other WordPress search plugins?

As long as the WordPress search plugins you’re using are based on and filter the default WordPress search results (using proper hooks), multilingual search will work and TranslatePress will make sure you get language-specific search results.

We’re looking to support all popular search plugins, so if you’re using one where multilingual search using TranslatePress isn’t working, please reach out here.

Setup Multilingual WordPress Search Today

As you’ve seen by now TransaltePress makes it really simple to translate your WordPress site and add a multilingual search form to it.

TranslatePress Multilingual

TranslatePress is the easiest way to translate your WordPress site. It's fast, won't slow down your website, works with ANY theme or plugin and it's SEO friendly.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

You can either translate the content manually, using the visual translation editor, or use automatic translation to speed things up and simply refine what’s needed.

Once your site is fully translated, using multilingual search your visitors or customers can easily find and browse the relevant content or products in their native language.

Do you still have questions about multilingual search in WordPress? Let us know in the comments!

If you found this post helpful, please check out our YouTube channel, where we constantly upload short & easy-to-follow video tutorials. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter to be the first to know each time we post.

The post Multilingual WordPress Search (How To Easily Search in Any Language) appeared first on TranslatePress.

Some translation plugins will require that you register widget fields for translation which is done either by writing code or by using a complicated interface / or a completely separate plugin. Others simply don’t have support for translating WordPress widgets. There is however a simpler and faster way. One that doesn’t require any custom code and is fully visual (you translate what you see).

In this tutorial we’ll focus on how to use TranslatePress – a WordPress translation plugin – to translate widgets in WordPress. Using its front-end visual translation interface all you do is click on a certain widget text and you can enter its translation in the sidebar, like this:

Ready to learn how to set it up? Here’s how to translate any WordPress widget using TranslatePress.

What are WordPress widgets and why translate them in the first place?

WordPress widgets allow you to add content to your website sidebar or footer area. Some common examples would be: adding a search box to your site, listing product categories for your WooCommerce store, or adding a Post Archives dropdown to your blog. Since plugins will often define their own widgets, the options available are unlimited.

Adding WordPress widgets to your website requires no code experience or expertise. They can be added, removed, and rearranged using the Theme Customizer or Appearance → Widgets in the WordPress admin interface.

A theme can place widget areas anywhere on a page. For example, besides the usual sidebar locations, some themes let you also place widgets in the footer of every page.

For this tutorial, we’ve set up a blog with a sidebar where we’ll add different types of widgets: a search box, a text/html widget, Recent Posts, Archives, and Categories. Then we’ll use TranslatePress to translate all of them.

Before we start off, here’s a quick video tutorial explaining how to do this in short:

But if you want to get into more detail and take things at your own pace, please continue reading this article.

Translate Widgets in WordPress Using TranslatePress

If you’re looking to make your website available in multiple languages you will need just one tool: TranslatePress.

TranslatePress Multilingual

TranslatePress is the easiest way to translate your WordPress site. It's fast, won't slow down your website, works with ANY theme or plugin and it's SEO friendly.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

Install TranslatePress and Choose Languages

You can start by installing and activating the free TranslatePress plugin from WordPress.org.

Once you’ve activated the plugin, navigate to Settings → TranslatePress and choose the languages you want to make your website available in.

First, choose the Default Language, which is the language that your website content is currently written in. Then, add new translation languages that you want to offer.

The free version of TranslatePress lets you translate your content into one new language while the premium version has support for adding unlimited languages.

The are a few other settings in TranslatePress, like adding and customizing a front-end language switcher, but for now, we’ll simply click Save Changes and proceed to translate the widget content.

Creating Multilingual Widgets in WordPress

We’re now ready to start translating our previously added widgets. For this simply navigate to the page (Blog in our case), where the widgets are displayed, and from the admin bar at the top click Translate Page.

Now, this is where the magic happens. This will open up the TranslatePress visual interface where you should see a live preview of your site, much like the native WordPress Customizer, and a translation sidebar on the left.

To translate a widget, all you do is hover over its text and click the blue pencil icon and enter your desired translation. Here’s how to translate the Search box into Spanish:

The same approach works for the “About Us” HTML widget

…and it’s the same for any other widget, independent of type or whether it was added by a plugin, theme, or WordPress itself.

You simply click to select a certain text, enter its translation, save and move to the next one. That’s it.

The same approach can be used to translate any type of content on your website. Besides standard content, TranslatePress makes it super easy to translate more complex elements like popus, images with text, sliders, or forms.

For a step-by-step guide on how to translate all your site content have a look at How to Create a Multilingual WordPress Site.

Translate Widgets in WordPress Automatically

Besides manual translation, TranslatePress has support for automatic translation as well.

So, to make things even easier you can simply enable automatic translation from TranslatePress settings and have your WordPress widgets translated in no time.

The plugin lets you connect to Google Translate or DeepL to use automatic machine translation on your site’s content. Google Translate integration is available with the free version of TranslatePress while DeepL requires the premium version.

We’ll use Google Translate for this tutorial. Under TranslatePress settings simply navigate to the Automatic Translation tab, and Enable Automatic Translation. Choose Google Translate as the translation engine and insert your Google Translate API Key.

Once you click Save Changes you can simply browse your website and see it instantly translated. Here’s what our blog page content (including widgets) looks like after enabling automatic translation:

TranslatePress will locally store the finished translations which means that you will only have to pay once the cost of automatic translation (not every time a user visits that page). It also increases speed (you don’t have to connect to the automatic translation service on every page load).

Besides this, you can always edit those automatic translations using the visual translation interface and make sure everything is properly translated.

How to Show Different Widgets based on Language

There are situations where you might want to display different widgets based on language. Not simply translate the widget content, but display a different widget altogether and translate that one.

You can easily achieve this using the free Widget Logic plugin in addition to TranslatePress.

Simply install and activate Widget Logic, then in the WordPress admin navigate to the widgets area under Appearance → Widgets. You’ll notice a Widget Logic field added under each widget.

Let’s say we want to display the Search box for English only and hide it on the Spanish blog.

For this, under the widget logic field we add: (get_locale() == 'en_US')

This will display the widget only when this condition is met. In our case, when the language you’re browsing is set to English (United States) → ‘en_US’.

Notice how the Search box dissapeared from the Spanish version of the site now:

For extra flexibility you can use any variations of the logic listed above, including negating it:
!(get_locale() == 'en_US'). This will make the search box appear on all the other language versions, except for English.

WordPress Language Switcher Widget

TranslatePress offers several ways of adding a WordPress language switcher to your site.

• Shortcode – You can use the shortcode [language-switcher] to display a language switcher on any page or in a widget.
• Menu item – Go to Appearance → Menus to add languages to your navigation.
• Floating language selection – Adding a floating dropdown that follows you on every page of your site.

To create a language switcher widget we’ll use the shortcode [language-switcher] and place it inside a text widget, like so:

Under the TranslatePress Settings → General tab, you have five options for configuring what the language switcher shortcode displays:

On the front-end, the language switcher widget shows a dropdown box that will allow visitors to easily switch languages.

Translate WordPress Widgets Today!

TranslatePress makes it super easy to translate any WordPress widget, directly from the front-end using a super intuitive visual interface. The same approach can be extended to translate all your site content and make it available in multiple languages.

TranslatePress Multilingual

TranslatePress is the easiest way to translate your WordPress site. It's fast, won't slow down your website, works with ANY theme or plugin and it's SEO friendly.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

To get started, you can download the free version of TranslatePress. Then, upgrade to a premium plan for unlimited translation languages, improved multilingual SEO, automatic translation via DeepL, automatic user language detection, and more.

Do you still have any questions about how to translate widgets in WordPress? Let us know in the comments below!

If you found this post helpful, please check out our YouTube channel, where we constantly upload short & easy-to-follow video tutorials. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter to be the first to know each time we post.

The post How to Translate Widgets in WordPress + Show Different Widgets based on Language appeared first on TranslatePress.

Also, there are some important things we’ve been working on, that haven’t been released yet. Each one of them will contribute significantly to the future growth of TranslatePress.

I’d like to share some details about each below. Welcome to the 2019 Year in Review for TranslatePress.

Revenue & User Growth

TranslatePress saw growth in both revenue and user adoption.

The plugin is now used on over 60K active websites, which is more than double than where it was 12 months ago.

An even more impressive growth happened revenue wise from our premium versions.

Our yearly revenue grew by 500% in 2019.

This is not something we take for granted and are extremely grateful for. It’s also a solid indicator that our efforts were put in the right places.

Since TranslatePress is a bootstrapped product, built using the resources of Cozmoslabs, this made it easier for us to focus on what we thought was really important for our users.

I would attribute the majority of this growth to our focus on making TranslatePress the most easy to use WordPress translation plugin on the market.

In 2019, there was a lot of development work aimed towards improving the overall user experience and attaining out of the box compatibility with other tools (plugins, themes etc.).

Besides this, it was the first year when we had a clear marketing strategy in place and stuck with it. More on that later.

We saw more and more people migrate from other translation solutions over to TranslatePress, due to it’s ease of use, speed and out of the box compatibility (especially when it comes to popular tools like WooCommerce or page builders).

Let’s have a look at some of the most important features and improvements added last year to TranslatePress.

New Features and Improvements in TranslatePress

Development wise, a significant amount of work revolved around improving user experience.

Here are the most important things added to TranslatePress last year:

• Image Translation – the ability to translate images, sliders and other media using the visual translation interface (directly from the front-end). This makes translating images with text integrated in the intuitive front-end translation flow and is a huge increase in the overall translation experience.
• DeepL integration for automatic translation – we added support for DeepL, which is a powerful machine translation tool backed by artificial intelligence and neural networks.
• Added support for keyboard shortcuts. This together with highlighting translation boxes with unsaved changes helped speed up the translation process.
• Translation Memory – suggest similar translated strings from which users can choose when entering a translation
• Ongoing compatibility with other plugins or themes. This varied from adding a few css tweaks and make sure the translation interface displays beautifully to managing conflicts with other plugins. Our promise is that TranslatePress should work out of the box with every WordPress tool used to build or add functionality to your site. Of course, this is not something we can control 100% every time, but all this compatibility work will benefit the end user and remove friction.
• Redesigned the Automatic Translation interface – since a significant amount of our users set up automatic translation to speed up the translation process, it made sense to make this simpler. We are however far from being done here and in 2020 we’ll looking to make the process of automatically translating your site friction-less.
• Speed optimizations – last but not least, we continued to add speed improvements to TranslatePress, making sure your website speed is not sacrificed when going multilingual (check out this comparison). Small page load times is another critical thing that separates us from other translation solutions on the market.

Upcoming New Features

Besides the above, there are some highly requested features that have been in the works for some time now and which will be launched soon.

I will list them here since most of their development happened in 2019:

• Multilingual Search – we’ll add support for multilingual search, the ability to search and display valid results in a certain language.
• String Translation – imagine having an interface for translating any string added by a theme or a plugin, independently of whether or not it’s displayed in the front-end. Looking to modify or translate WooCommerce emails without messing around with templates? The new String Translation interface from TranslatePress will make this easier than ever. You’ll have filtering options that will make it simple to translate any string coming from a plugin or theme.The same goes for url slug translation. Whether you’re looking to translate all post/page slugs at once, or things like taxonomies & terms, you’ll be able to do this from one place and make sure you don’t miss any.

Both of these features will be released soon.

Marketing and Content

Another key factor behind the growth of TranslatePress in 2019 has been a consistent marketing strategy.

A good product is not enough anymore in an overly crowded WordPress plugin ecosystem. Even a great product can fall short and not get noticed, without the consistent efforts to spread the word and educate.

As developers and engineers at core, marketing has never come naturally to us. It’s more fun to solve a technical challenge behind a new features than to write, focusing on a pain your potential customer is facing and teaching him ways to overcome it. Some of which include using your product, of course. In order to be noticed, this needs to become a habit.

It’s no secret that content marketing done right and consistent leads to results. Our monthly traffic doubled in 2019, mostly due to our content marketing efforts.

We published regularly on our blog, as well as continued to add support pages to our documentation. For example, if you’re using a page builder to build a multilingual site, you can find step by step tutorials for all major page builders ( like Elementor, Beaver Builder, Divi, Visual Composer or Brizy).

To take our content marketing to the next level, we’re actively looking for a marketing manager to oversee and coordinate all the marketing activities behind TranslatePress. If you’re interested, drop us a line.

We’ve also set up an affiliate system since more and more users wanted to recommend TranslatePress. If you found our plugin useful and think it can help others, make sure to sign up and earn up to 30% for each sale.

I also did a couple of interviews (for Kinsta, Themeisle and WPLeaders) as well as podcast appearances, trying to share the leanings of our journey as a WordPress product company.

I always found reading other people stories inspiring and insightful, so this is something I meant to do for quite some time.

WordCamps and the WordPress community

No doubt, one of the best things about WordPress is the community built around it. And WordCamps are probably the easiest way to meet people that are part of this community.

Last year, almost all of our team attended WordCamp Europe in Berlin. It’s the biggest WordPress event on the globe, where you can pretty much meet face to face all the people that you just know of or heard of from the internet. We also wanted to be sponsors, but due to some bad planning this didn’t happen.

However, it was a great event, where I almost lost my voice in the two days of intense networking. It was great to meet old friends, as well as new people some of whom I’ve already exchanged emails with.

For us attending a WordCamp is also a great team building opportunity. Even though we share the same office, it’s incredible what travelling together and spending time outside the “default” work environment can do to the team spirit.

This year we’re going to sponsor multiple WordCamps, WordCamp Europe in Porto being one of them.

Also, it will be our third year sponsoring WordCamp Bucharest, a local WordCamp really close to our hearths.

If you’re planning to attend, make sure to drop by the TranslatePress booth and say hi!

What’s next in 2020?

I’ve already drafted a 2020 roadmap for TranslatePress and it’s exciting, to say the least.

Here are some of the things that will receive our focus this year:

• Redesign our website – this has been long overdue and I’m quite happy it will happen soon.
• Improve the value proposition of the plugin – there will be some highly requested features coming to TranslatePress this year, so stay tuned.
• Grow our team and delegate more – sustaining growth requires extra resources, so we’re already looking to expand our support, development and marketing teams.
• Attend and sponsor multiple WordCamps – this for us has been a great way to build relationships with users and creators in the WordPress space, get face to face feedback as well as give back to the WordPress community.

2019 has been a rewarding year for TranslatePress. We’re extremely grateful for each one of you, our users, and excited for what’s yet to come. Here’s to a great 2020!

P.S. If you’re new to TranslatePress, it’s the easiest way to turn your WordPress site multilingual. Grab the free version or upgrade to a premium plan (for extended functionality) and start translating your site today.

The post 2019 Year in Review: Growth, Marketing, WordCamps & Upcoming Features! appeared first on TranslatePress.

Automatically translating your WordPress site is a excellent way to speed up the translation process and use automatic translations as a starting point for your multilingual content. You can have everything translated in minutes, not days or weeks.

In this tutorial we’ll go through how to automatically translate WordPress sites fast and with minimal costs by using TranslatePress.

TranslatePress offers both automatic and manual translations. What sets TranslatePress apart from other multilingual solutions is that you can to translate all your site content directly from the front-end, by using a visual translation interface.

Let’s get started…

How to Automatically Translate Any Website With Google Translate

Later in this post, we’ll show you the most optimal way to use automatic translation to translate your own website. But if you’re looking to translate someone else’s website, all you need is Google Translate.

This is useful if there’s a website in another language that you want to experience, or if you just generally need to translate a website that you don’t control.

To get started, go to the regular Google Translate page and choose the language that the website is in (on the left) as well as the language into which you want to translate the website’s content (on the right).

Then, instead of entering the text that you want to translate like you normally would, just paste the URL to the website that you want to translate in the box on the left. Then, click the link in the box on the right to open the translated version of the website.

For example, to translate the TranslatePress website from English to Spanish, you would configure it like so:

When you click the link, it will open the translated version of the website, along with a new toolbar from Google Translate. You can click around to different parts of the site just like you normally would and you can also use the toolbar to change languages and switch back to the original version as needed:

And there you have it – an easy way to automatically translate a website.

Why Dynamic Translation From Google Translate Isn’t Good for Your Own Website

The Google Translate method above is really handy if you need to translate a website that you don’t control. But if you’re looking to translate your own website to create a multilingual website, you shouldn’t use this dynamic approach.

It’s important to note that only the “dynamic” part is the problem.

It’s totally fine to use Google Translate to automatically translate your content, you just need to do so in a way that creates static versions of the translated content after you generate your translations using Google Translate, which is what we’ll show you in the tutorial below.

There are two problems with just using Google Translate to dynamically translate your content on-demand:

• Multilingual SEO – with dynamic translation, the translated versions of your content don’t have their own permanent URLs on your site, which means that Google won’t be able to include them in its search index and you won’t be able to rank for multilingual search terms. This is a big negative if your goal is to benefit from multilingual SEO.
• Accuracy (no manual control) – because the translation happens dynamically, you don’t have the option to manually edit the translations once they’ve been generated. Sometimes the automatic translation isn’t perfect, so this might mean you have to put up with inaccurate translations.

If you want to automatically translate your website, a better approach is to use Google Translate (or another service) to generate your site’s initial translations. However, instead of doing so dynamically, you take those translations and store them in your site’s database.

Because you’re locally storing the translations, you can create static, indexable versions of your translated content (for SEO) and you can also edit the automatic translations as needed.

In the tutorial below, we’ll show you how to implement this approach on WordPress using the free TranslatePress plugin.

Why You Should Still Automatically Translate WordPress Site

As long as you don’t use the dynamic approach, translating your WordPress site automatically is an excellent choice that will allow you to go multilingual, while saving both time and money.

Even if you’re fluent in the languages you want to make your site available in, setting up automatic translation is a great starting point. Once your content is automatically translated, you could review everything and make the necessary changes.

Keep in mind that this step is critical if you’re serious about multilingual SEO. But we’ll dive into the details of ranking in more languages later.

For now I think we can both agree that automatic translations are a great time saver.

If you’re not fluent in the languages your website will be available in, starting with automatic translations is still a great option. Once your site is automatically translated, you can hire a professional translator to polish everything and give your content a human touch.

Most of it won’t need any changes, but some parts of the text may need human intervention for making sure the meaning of each sentence is clear, and not just translated literally. TranslatePress let’s you set up Translator Accounts, so you can easily create or allow a professional translator go over your site and make changes without giving him admin rights.

And last but not least, translation costs. The costs of working with a professional translator are much higher than those of using an automatic translation service. Besides this, the back and forth with finding the right translators, get everything translated and approved will delay things significantly.

TranslatePress is optimized to minimize your costs with translating text automatically.

Below, I’ll explain more about how TranslatePress will make sure you only pay once for a certain text to be automatically translated, and NOT be charged every time a user tries to browse a translated page.

How to Automatically Translate WordPress Site Using TranslatePress

Translating your WordPress site automatically is really straight forward using TranslatePress and its automatic translation feature.

It lets you enable and use Google Translate API or the powerful DeepL API. We’ll go through both of these two automatic translation services below.

To get started let’s say you’re an online business selling WordPress themes and you’re looking to reach more customers by offering your content in their native language. For this tutorial I created a page using an Elementor template and added some content.

Here’s how it looks:

Feel free to use your existing website content, as it will work exactly the same.

Install and Set Up TranslatePress

You can download the free version of TranslatePress from wp.org. In your WordPress dashboard, simply go to Plugins → Add New and search for “TranslatePress”. Install and activate the plugin.

Next, head over to Settings → TranslatePress to configure your multilingual options.

First up, you’ll want to choose the languages to use on your site. Select the current language of your site in the Default Language drop-down. For us this will be English (United States). Then, choose the new language into which you want to automatically translate you content. We’ll add Spanish (Spain) for this tutorial.

The Settings page also allows you to customize the look of the language switcher, but we can leave everything to default for now and click “Save Changes”. By default, you’ll notice a floating language dropdown that will follow you on every page, making it easy to change the language.

Next, click on the “Automatic Translation” tab and make sure to “Enable Automatic Translation” by setting it to “Yes”.

You will then be asked to choose your translation engine for automatically translating your site content.

Using Google Translate to Automatically Translate WordPress Site

The first option for automatically translating your site is to use Google Translate API. Simply follow these steps for generating a Google API Key (or watch this video) and then copy it under “Google Translate API Key”.

Hit “Save Changes” and you’re done! When you first navigate to the Spanish version of your page, it will be automatically translated to Spanish. In the visual translation editor, you can easily modify anything that sounds off.

That was fast, right?

Using DeepL to Automatically Translate WordPress Site

DeepL is a great service for high quality automatic translations, because it uses neural networks and artificial intelligence to translate texts. This results in accurate translations, where very little human intervention is needed.

You can allow TranslatePress to translate your site automatically using the DeepL Automatic Translation add-on, available in the premium version.

Once you download and install the DeepL add-on, under TranslatePress → Settings → Automatic Translation tab, you’ll be able to insert the DeepL API Key. DeepL offers free API access that allows you to translate up to 500,000 characters per month for free. If you need more than this, you’ll have to purchase an API key, which costs 4.99€ + translation fees.

After entering the DeepL API key, hit Save Changes and you’re done. The first time you or a user visits a page in Spanish, DeepL will automatically translate it.

How TranslatePress Minimizes Automatic Translation Costs

Now that we saw how easy it is to automatically translate a WordPress site using TranslatePress and its integration with automatic translation services, lets have a look at how it helps you minimize costs.

The automatic translation is triggered ONLY the first time a user visits a page that hasn’t been translated yet.

By browsing your site for the first time in a certain language you’re actually automatically translating it page by page. Once a text has been automatically translated, TranslatePress stores it in your database, thereby minimizing the requests to the automatic translation service.

This also results in a fast loading of the translated pages.

You can also keep costs under control by setting a daily limit for the automatically translated characters.

By default, we are also blocking crawlers from triggering automatic translations on your site, as this can also result in unwanted costs from texts that maybe you didn’t want translated.

All these options are part of the Automatic Translation tab in TranslatePress.

Manually Editing Automatic Translations

Once your page has been automatically translated, you can easily refine translations by browsing it using TranslatePress visual translation editor. In fact, it’s highly recommended you do this.

Simply navigate to the page you want to edit, then click “Translate Page” from the admin toolbar at the top.

This will open up a visual translation editor, where you simply hover and click the pencil icon to select a certain text. Then you can modify its translation in the left sidebar, save and move to the next one.

You can do this yourself or give access to a professional translator using the Translator Accounts add-on.

Besides text, TranslatePress lets you translate many other elements, like images, pop-ups, sliders, widgets or menu items.

No matter how your content was created, be it using a page builder, output from a plugin shortcode, custom fields or custom posts types, as long as it’s displayed in the front-end of your site you’ll be able to translate it automatically or manually using TranslatePress.

Multilingual SEO and Automatic Translations

Last but not least, if you want your content to rank in translated languages you need to follow the multilingual SEO principles.

If you’re using TranslatePress, the plugin will automatically add the hreflang attribute for each language that your site uses. This way Google knows the language for each piece of content from your website.

TranslatePress SEO Pack add-on will make sure you are able to automatically translate the most important SEO elements on a page. Things like URL slug, page title, description, image alt tags or social graph tags.
It works out of the box with all popular SEO plugins (like Yoast SEO, Rank Math, All in One SEO, SEOPress) and extends their sitemap functionality to create a multilingual sitemap that follows Google’s recommendations.

Make sure to review everything that has been automatically translated. First, make sure that each page has been fully translated, as Google strongly advises that each page has content available in ONE language only. Otherwise, the chances of ranking for that page will drop significantly.

Second, make sure to modify all sentences or bits of text that have been translated literally by the automatic translation engine and lack meaning. Everything needs to read like it was written by a human, to increase your chances of ranking well.

If you have content that’s available only for certain user roles or logged-in users, the translation editor lets you browse the site as a certain user role in order to translate user specific content.

That’s How You Automatically Translate Your WordPress Site

Automatically translating WordPress sites using TranslatePress is really straight forward and requires no special knowledge. Once your multi language website is automatically translated, you can browse each page and manually change any bits of text that lack meaning or sound off.

Besides ease of use, the beauty of using TranslatePress visual translation interface is that you are always familiar with the context in which a sentence or piece of text is appearing. This makes it easy to come up with the right translation for it.

Since TranslatePress works out of the box with any translation-ready theme or plugin, including WooCommerce or page builders, the same principles shown here can be used to translate any type of WordPress site, independently of the tools used to create it.

TranslatePress Multilingual

TranslatePress is the easiest way to translate your WordPress site. It's fast, won't slow down your website, works with ANY theme or plugin and it's SEO friendly.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

To learn more about how TranslatePress can help you automatically translate WordPress sites, make sure to check out all the features.

Also, make sure to browse this short video covering the few steps required for setting up TranslatePress with Google Translate to automatically translate all your website content:

If you’re looking to translate your website automatically and have any questions, please make sure to ask them in the comments section below.

The post How to Automatically Translate WordPress Site (fast and with minimal costs) appeared first on TranslatePress.

Since a significant amount of TranslatePress users have been enthusiastically requesting DeepL support (stating that it’s better than Google Translate), we had to oblige.

The result: you can now allow TranslatePress to automatically translate your site using the DeepL Automatic Translation add-on.

TranslatePress Multilingual

TranslatePress is the easiest way to translate your WordPress site. It's fast, won't slow down your website, works with ANY theme or plugin and it's SEO friendly.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

Below, we’ll go through the simple steps needed to have your website automatically translated using DeepL.

What is DeepL?

DeepL is a relatively new automatic translation service, that has climbed rapidly among the best machine translation services.

It uses neural networks and artificial intelligence to translate texts, which results in high quality and accurate translations. It’s really good with grasping the meaning of a sentence, rather than going for a literal translation.

While it does support a limited number of languages (currently 24), this number is gradually increasing.

Here’s the list of supported languages in DeepL:

• Bulgarian
• Czech
• Danish
• German
• Greek
• English
• Spanish
• Estonian
• Finnish
• French
• Hungarian
• Italian
• Japanese
• Lithuanian
• Latvian
• Dutch
• Polish
• Portuguese
• Romanian
• Russian
• Slovak
• Slovenian
• Swedish
• Chinese

Setting up DeepL WordPress Translation Plugin

1. Install TranslatePress and its DeepL Automatic Translation add-on

Get a TranslatePress Business or Developer license, which also includes the DeepL Automatic Translation add-on.

Then, from your account page you can download the main TranslatePress plugin, as well as all the pro add-ons.

Install and activate both TranslatePress and then the DeepL Automatic Translation add-on. Head over to Settings > TranslatePress and enter the plugin’s license key under the License tab.

Next, under TranslatePress Setttings -> General we’ll choose the languages to use on your site. Select the current language of your site in the Default Language drop-down. Then, choose the new language into which you want to automatically translate it using DeepL.

You can add as many languages as you need using the Multiple Languages add-on, but for the purpose of this tutorial we’ll stick to two, English and Italian.

Make sure the translation languages you add here are supported by DeepL.

2. Generate DeepL API Key

Next, we’ll head over to TranslatePress Automatic Translation tab.

From here we’ll enable automatic translation and select DeepL as our translation engine.

In order to use the DeepL API, you will need to get a key.

DeepL offers free API access that allows you to translate up to 500,000 characters per month for free.

If you need more than that, you need to purchase a key from here. The package that contains API access is listed under For Developers -> DeepL API and it costs 4.99€ + usage fees. Automatic translation costs will be on top of this.

After you’ve created the account for DeepL go to your Account page where you’ll find your API key:

All that’s left is for us to copy this key under TranslatePress Automatic Translation -> DeepL API Key.

Click “Save Changes” and we’re done.

3. Browse your site and see how it’s automatically translated

That’s it! You can now simply navigate to the front-end of your website and browse it in the language of your choice. You’ll notice the content has been translated automatically.

As you notice, we created and automatically translated a WooCommerce store and all its products using DeepL.

The automatic translation is triggered ONLY the first time a user visits a page that hasn’t been translated yet. By browsing your site for the first time in a certain language you’re actually translating it page by page.

If some of the translated texts sound off, you can easily click and modify it using the visual translation interface from TranslatePress.

Also, by installing the Translator Accounts add-on, you can create accounts for professional translators that can review the automatically translated version of your site. Because it has been automatically translated, the process of reviewing translations will be much faster and cheaper. Also, it will guarantee you everything is translated properly and in context.

4. (Optional) Set a daily limit for automatically translated characters

In order to keep translation costs under control, TranslatePress allows you to set a daily limit for the automatically translated characters.

We’re also blocking crawlers from triggering automatic translations on your site, which can result in unwanted costs from texts that maybe you didn’t want translated.

You’ll find all these options under the Automatic Translation tab.

Will adding automatic translation affect your site speed?

An important aspect when it comes to automatically translating your site is how it affects your page load time.

If every time a user accesses a page in Italian, you have to hit the automatic translation service API, grab the translations and display them, this will have a negative impact on your multilingual site speed.

In TranslatePress the automatic translation happens once, when the page is first loaded (and only for the requested language), then it is saved in your database and served from there. This combined with blocking crawlers from triggering automatic translations, will result in no visible impact on your site speed.

That’s how to automatically translate your WordPress site

That’s how easy it is to automatically translate your website using TranslatePress and the DeepL Automatic Translation add-on.

TranslatePress Multilingual

TranslatePress is the easiest way to translate your WordPress site. It's fast, won't slow down your website, works with ANY theme or plugin and it's SEO friendly.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

The automatically translated text will be high quality and will require very little editing on your side to make sure everything is understandable. Using the visual translation interface you or your hired professional translators can easily browse the site and modify texts that lack meaning or seem out of context.

Due to the extended control that TranslatePress offers when it comes to automatic translations, you’ll be able to keep automatic translation costs under control. Everything that has been translated using the DeepL API is stored by the plugin, so you’ll only be charged once for translating a certain text. This means less calls to the DeepL translation API, and no visible impact on your site speed.

Besides the DeepL Automatic Translation add-on the premium TranslatePress version will give you access to the SEO Pack add-on. By activating it you’ll be able to automatically translate your URL slugs, titles, description, social media graph tags, create multilingual sitemaps and more. It will significantly increase your chances of ranking in more languages.

To learn more, head here to check out all of the premium features of TranslatePress.

Do you still have any more questions about the TranslatePress DeepL integration? Let us know in the comments!

If you found this post helpful, please check out our YouTube channel, where we constantly upload short & easy-to-follow video tutorials. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter to be the first to know each time we post.

The post DeepL Integration available in TranslatePress appeared first on TranslatePress.

Translating images in WordPress comes in really handy especially when you deal with images containing text, text that needs to be translated for each language.

Image translation, or more generally, media translation is really straight forward using TranslatePress. As with other types of content, you will be able to translate images directly from the front-end, using TranslatePress visual translation editor.

This functionality extends to all media types, whether it’s images with text, sliders, videos or other uploaded media, you can use the same approach below to translate them as well as the associated meta information (e.g title, alt text).

If you’re in a hurry and a quick video tutorial will do it for you, you can watch this short video on image translation:

But if you want the full picture, keep reading!

Translate Images in WordPress

Translating images directly from the front-end was something our users constantly requested. We had a solution for this, in the form of a conditional shortcode based on language, which worked just fine.

However, this had to be used in the back-end, so somehow breaking the intuitive front-end translation flow that TranslatePress is known for.

You should be able to translate ANY type of content directly from the front-end. That’s why with a bit of refactoring, we moved the ability to translate images, sliders & more to the front-end. This makes it easier than ever to display different media based on language.

Some of the use cases of image translation in WordPress:

• having an image or website logo with text, that needs to change when you change the language.
• selling an ebook, where the cover needs to reflect the title in the selected language of your multi language site
• creating multilingual sliders, that contain several images with text that need to be translated
• translating WooCommerce product images (courses, events, books, t-shirts…really any type of product that has text on it)

Translating Images Containing Text

Now that we went through some of the use cases of image translation, let’s dive in the simple process of translating images containing text.

After installing and activating TranslatePress, you’ll notice a new Translate Site” item added in the admin bar.

Hover over it and click “Settings” to be taken to TranslatePress settings. From here you can add a new translation language. We’ll use Spanish for this example.

After that, simply “Save changes” and click “Translate Site” to start translating your site content.

You’ll be taken to a front-end visual translation interface. From here you can navigate to the page containing your image with text.

Simply hover over the image and click the pencil icon to replace it with a different image containing the text in Spanish.

In our case we have a blog post focusing on “Saving the trees”, that includes an image with text. After clicking the pencil icon, in the translation sidebar you can upload or select a different image source for the Spanish version.

Select or upload the translated version of the image, click “Save” and you’re done. Switching the language to Spanish will now display the Spanish version of the image with text.

You can also select the image by name from Translation sidebar, locating it in the drop-down of strings under Images option group.

Translating Image Title and Alt Attribute

Moving forward, besides the image source you can also translate meta information such as the title and alt attribute.

To translate the alt attribute you will need the SEO Add-on which is available in the premium versions of the plugin.

Translating the image alt text can have a positive impact on the search engine rankings in multiple languages.

Having the SEO add-on installed and activated, will give you access to translating the alt text when clicking an image. If your image has a title set in the original language, you’ll be able to translate that as well.

As seen in the image above, all the image meta information will be displayed together with the image source in the translation sidebar.

Translate Images Containing Links

Another popular scenario for WordPress image translation is when that certain image contains a link as well. For example an ebook cover image linking to a .pdf with its content, or different external links to where different versions can be purchased.

If your image links to something, TranslatePress will detect this and allow you to modify the media link or external url based on language.

If your image contains a link, you’ll notice an “Anchor link” displayed in the translation sidebar when selecting it. This can be used to have translated versions of your image link to different places.

In the example above we used it to link to different Amazon book pages. The English version links to the Amazon English title, while the Spanish cover links to Amazon Spanish version of the book.

Create Multilingual Sliders

Since sliders are basically a collection of images, you can use the same approach to translate an image slider or carousel containing multiple images.

You’ll simply need to hover over each image that needs to be translated, click the pencil icon and select the one you want to replace it with in a different language.

If the slider images contain links to certain local media files or link externally even, you can use the “Anchor link” to customize it based on selected language.

Here’s how the example slider looks when you switch languages on the front end.

Not bad for about 10 seconds of your time.

Wrapping It Up

Translating images in WordPress using TranslatePress now follows the same intuitive visual approach as with translating any type of content (be it Gutenberg blocks, Elementor content, forms, pop-ups & more).

TranslatePress Multilingual

TranslatePress is the easiest way to translate your WordPress site. It's fast, won't slow down your website, works with ANY theme or plugin and it's SEO friendly.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

Due to its front-end translation approach, you can use TranslatePress to translate all your website content, independently of how it was created.

Do you still have any questions about image translation in WordPress? Let us know in the comments!

If you found this post helpful, please check out our YouTube channel, where we constantly upload short & easy-to-follow video tutorials. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter to be the first to know each time we post.

The post How to Translate Images in WordPress [Complete Guide] appeared first on TranslatePress.

How to Translate Widgets in WordPress + Show Different Widgets based on Language

Contact Form 7 is the most popular contact form plugin for WordPress. It’s free and powers over 5 million websites.

Translating forms built with Contact Form 7 allows you to offer a single form that will be available in multiple languages. No need to set up multiple forms with different field names for each language.

Below we’ll look into how to translate forms created with Contact Form 7 using TranslatePress.

How to Translate Contact Form 7

We’ll start by setting up a new contact form using Contact Form 7. After installing and activating the plugin, you’ll notice a new menu item “Contact“.

We’ll select the Contact Forms submenu item, then click the Add New button for setting up our first contact form.

Here we can set up the form and control things like:

• edit the form template and select the fields you want the form to contain;
• edit the email template that the admin receives when a form is submitted;
• modify the validation and success messages.

After you finish editing the form template, click Save. A shortcode will be displayed which you can place on a page or widget, for outputting the form.

We’ll place it inside a newly created “Contact Us” page.

After saving the page, let’s have a look at what the form looks like on the front-end:

Next, we’ll proceed with installing and activating TranslatePress for translating Contact Form 7.

After activating TranslatePress, you’ll notice a new Translate Site item added in the admin bar.

Just hover over it and click Settings. This will take you to the TranslatePress Settings page.

Here we can add the languages in which we want to translate the contact form. We’ll use two languages for this tutorial.

English is our default language, and we’ll also add Spanish. You’ll notice there are a few other settings (like Google Translate integration for automatic translation or customizing the language switcher), but we’ll skip them for now and click Save Changes.

We’re now ready to translate our form built with Contact Form 7.

Translate Contact Form Fields

To start translating the contact form fields we’ll simply navigate to the “Contact Us” page (where the form is located), then click the Translate Page button from the admin bar.

This will open up a front-end translation editor where you can translate every string on a page and see the changes in real-time.

Once you hover over a certain field label a pencil icon will appear. Clicking it will allow translating that certain string. Enter the translation and click the Save button.

This way you’ll be able to translate each form field and description, including the “Send” button text.

Option values for select, checkbox, radio, etc. are all found in the String list dropdown on the left. This contains all the strings found on that page so you can use it to translate strings that don’t have the pencil icon showing up.

In this case, let’s select and translate the options from “Contacting us about” dropdown.

This concludes the contact form fields translation.

Translate Contact Form Error and Success Messages

Next, there are certain messages a contact form displays after clicking the submit button. Things like validation, errors, or successful submission messages.

For Contact Form 7, they are all located under Messages tab, when editing or adding a new form. Have a look at the list of messages and see which ones apply to your form.

In order to translate these with TranslatePress, we need to first trigger them in the front-end. Then, once they’re visible we can select and translate each one of them.
For validation messages, trigger the form submission by clicking the Send button. Once the errors are displayed click on them and add the translation.

Do the same for success messages and you’ll have your contact form fully translated.

Wrapping It All Up

Creating multilingual contact forms using Contact Form 7 with TranslatePress is really straightforward due to the intuitive front-end translation approach.

Using tools like automatic user language detection available in TranslatePress, you can display automatically the translated version of the contact form to visitors in their own language.

TranslatePress Multilingual

TranslatePress is the easiest way to translate your WordPress site. It's fast, won't slow down your website, works with ANY theme or plugin and it's SEO friendly.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

If you want to see TranslatePress in action, make sure to play with our demo.

Do you still have any questions about translating Contact Form 7? Let us know in the comments!

If you found this post helpful, please check out our YouTube channel, where we constantly upload short & easy-to-follow video tutorials. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter to be the first to know each time we post.

The post Translate Contact Form 7 using TranslatePress appeared first on TranslatePress.

If you’re running a multi language website though, figuring out how to translate popup content can be quite challenging. That’s because finding a solution that works independently of the popup solution you’re using is not straightforward.

Most WordPress translation plugins need to add compatibility for a certain popup plugin in order to make its content translatable, while others simply won’t work. Since there are a ton of pop-up plugins to choose from, it’s easy to get lost.

Due to its front-end visual translation interface, TranslatePress will help you translate popup content independently of the tool used to create it. The same goes for forms, WooCommerce products, or Gutenberg blocks for that matter.

Below we’re going to go into the exact steps needed to translate the content of any popup into multiple languages.

Steps for translating popup content

1. Install TranslatePress

First, we’ll install TranslatePress. After activating the plugin, you’ll notice a new Translate Site item added in the admin bar.

Just hover over it and click Settings (or you can click the Settings menu item and select TranslatePress). This will take you to the TranslatePress Settings page.

Here we can add the languages in which we want to translate the popup content.

English is our default language, and we’ll also add Spanish. There are a few other settings (like integration with Google Translate for automatic translation), but we’ll skip them for now and click Save Changes.

2. Create the Lightbox Popup

In this tutorial, we’ll create a lightbox popup for collecting user emails.

The popup will be set to show up after the user scrolls a significant portion (~80%) of your article, it’s clearly engaged with your content and there’s a high chance he will want to become a subscriber.

For this, we’ll be using Elementor, the most popular page builder for WordPress that allows you to also create and integrate popups on your website. The Popup Builder is part of Elementor Pro.

After installing and activating the plugin, in the WP Dashboard, under Templates select Popups. Then click Add New to create our first pop-up template. You can select from a predefined list of templates and customize it to your needs.

Once you’re satisfied with the created popup, you can hit publish and set the conditions, triggers, and advanced rules for your popup. These settings will determine when and how the popup appears.

3. Translate Popup Content

Now that we’ve created the popup and added the triggers, all that’s left to do is to translate it.

For this we go to Templates → Popups, select the newly created popup template and click Preview Changes.

This will open a preview of our popup. Now, from the admin bar click Translate Page and you’ll be prompted with a translation interface allowing you to translate the popup content.

You simply select each popup text and enter its Spanish translation, then click Save translation.

Once you’re done, close the translation window and start navigating the Spanish version of the website. When the popup appears, it will be translated.

The same intuitive process can be used to translate any other type of popup.

If your entire website is built using Elementor, make sure to check out this in-depth tutorial on how to translate Elementor sites (fast and easy). It goes through translating all the wide range of content that Elementor lets you create.

Get started translating popup content

Using TranslatePress, translating popup content is really intuitive. You simply preview the popup in the front-end of your website, then using the visual translation editor you click to select a certain text from the popup and enter its translation. This will make it really easy to display your popup content in multiple languages.

TranslatePress Multilingual

TranslatePress is the easiest way to translate your WordPress site. It's fast, won't slow down your website, works with ANY theme or plugin and it's SEO friendly.

Get the plugin

Or download FREE version

Do you still have any questions about translating popup content? Let us know in the comments!

If you found this post helpful, please check out our YouTube channel, where we constantly upload short & easy-to-follow video tutorials. You can also follow us on Facebook and Twitter to be the first to know each time we post.

Related: How to Translate Custom Fields in WordPress

The post How to easily Translate Popup Content on your Multilingual Site appeared first on TranslatePress.

Then, in the last month of 2018, TranslatePress sales passed the 10000$ monthly recurring revenue mark.

This is HUGE for us and a solid confirmation that our efforts are focused in the right direction.

Besides this, the free version active installs grew to 30K.

Below we’re going to go into what happened in the last 4 months, the things we focused on as well as a detailed revenue breakdown. Welcome to Transparency Report #2.

Development, Better Processes, and Speed Improvements

Development wise the last period was focused on two main things: (more) speed improvements as well as getting TranslatePress to work for a lot of edge cases.

Speed is critical, so we’re constantly looking to make TranslatePress as fast as possible. To achieve this we are caching operations that are intensive.

Less load on your multilingual site means more traffic (due to better SEO) and an increase in your conversion rate. 

Apart from this, new features were put on hold in order to fix edge case bugs, making sure TranslatePress works out of the box for everyone.

For this, when fixing a certain bug we wanted to make sure we don’t create a new one (this actually happened a few times in the past months).

So Madalin started to write specific unit tests that make sure each piece of code we write solves more problems than it creates. I’m exaggerating a bit here, but you get the point.

Also, we took steps to make sure the plugin never fails silently, so we can quickly identify the problem, and spend less time on debugging and more on coming up with a solution for it.

Since we’re offering 100% WooCommerce compatibility – the ability to translate all strings (even from AJAX), product slugs, detecting and translating gettext strings – this is a big deal for us.

WordPress 5.0 is out. What this means for TranslatePress

WordPress 5.0 came out at the end of November and with it, the new block-based editor known as Gutenberg.

Gutenberg introduces a whole new approach to the way content is created. The entire editing experience has been rebuilt for media-rich pages and posts. Gutenberg blocks are a great visual tool for building and styling different types of content, without having to write a single line of code.

So, what does this mean for TranslatePress? 

TranslatePress continues to work out of the box and is 100% Gutenberg compatible.

The reason for that is that TranslatePress deals with the content of your website on the front-end, after it has been generated as HTML. So it doesn’t matter what type of editor you use for creating the content.

Make sure to check out this tutorial on how to translate Gutenberg blocks.

Sponsoring our second WordCamp

After last year’s experience sponsoring our first WordCamp, we knew we had to do it again. 

This year was a bit different, most people already knew about TranslatePress and we even met some of our paying users face to face. Some of them wanted to hear about the things that we worked on in the past 12 months. Others provided feedback.

Most of the ones who haven’t heard about TranslatePress before were quite impressed after showing them the demo.

I also got asked if sponsoring a WordCamp is a good investment. If your short-term goal is to bring in new business that’s a multiplier of your sponsorship package, you may be disappointed.

Sponsoring a WordCamp is a great way to give back to the WordPress community and develop relationships. Some of these relationships, if properly nurtured, might take your business to the next level. If you look at it this way, it’s a no brainier.

I’m constantly amazed by the openness to help and share things among the WordPress community. 

That being said this was a great team-building experience for us, a tradition I would like to keep in 2019 as well.

Revenue breakdown (details)

This is a breakdown of the sales that came in last month (December) :

Normally, December is not a great month in terms of sales. However it was our best month to date, and it brought in 9130€ (that’s around 10400$).

Now let’s look at the past 4 months in terms of revenue, since our last report.

As you notice September and October were quite steady, around 5000-5500$, then the sales grew to 8500$ in November and passed 10K in December.

While I’m fully aware these monthly sales may have fluctuations, the overall trend is healthy. And it will be interesting to see what the next 4 months will look like since we’ll also have the automatic renewals coming in beginning this year.

What didn’t go as planned

As mentioned before, improving our processes, creating unit tests and our speed obsession took a lot of development time.

This meant some of our most requested features were put on hold. We didn’t get to ship our new Media Translation add-on, even though we had a working prototype at the end of October.

However frustrating this is, these steps were necessary and we learned from them.

[UPDATE] Image translation is now part of TranslatePress core. Check it out!

Apart from that, we did hit the majority of the goals set in our past report These were:

• Power 30K+ websites before the end of the year ✔
• Get to 7000+$/month revenue by December ✔
• Stick to our development roadmap (here we came a little short)
• Write more, improve our docs, publish more resources  ✔

What’s next?

Moving forward, our key focus will be on acceleration in feature development.

Let’s have a look at our goals for the next 4 months:

• Launch Media/Image Translation (this module offers the ability to translate images, links, and any type of media in a very intuitive UI)
• DeepL integration (a very high quality automatic translation service) [Update] Done
• Taxonomy translations
• Publish an email course on building multilingual sites
• Grow our site traffic by 50%
• Write 2-3 useful tutorials each month
• Get to 14000$ MRR
• Power 50K websites

Looking back, 2018 has been a really good year for TranslatePress. The plugin has matured, gained in complexity, while also maintaining its simplicity and ease of use.

All of this wouldn’t have been possible without the hard work of a great team as well as constant feedback from you, TranslatePress users.

Thank you all and here’s to a great 2019!

The post Passing 10000$ Monthly Recurring Revenue Transparency Report #2 appeared first on TranslatePress.