WordPress × AI: The Future of Website Translations

Have you ever battled with the idea that Google Translate could be the low-cost, low-effort solution to your translation woes? Then AI tools will make you think twice again!

Highlights
00:00 Intro
01:24 Translating With Google Translate
02:34 Bridging the Quality Gap
03:38 Teaching AI your Tone of Voice
05:49 Mastering Multilingual WordPress Websites

Steffen: 0:00

Hey Dominik, hey Stefan, can you automatically translate your WordPress website? Well, in our last episode, i think, we talked about translating WordPress websites, and there's one part where we thought about additional options like AI translations.

Steffen: 0:23

I think this way of multi-site, multi-market websites. This is an example of all the three approaches that you just described. We're having a multi-site setup with individual sites for multiple markets. We are using WPML to manage content independently for each of those sites And we're using kind of localization options for us in the shape of using translatable options in WordPress, still with WPML, but this could also be the native localization option And, as you said, it's just different levels. You need to combine them. There's so far no native way in WordPress to do that, so everything is a little bit of a hack, but we've done this for more than 10 years very reliably on very large websites. But it's up to you to choose which approach is right, and we are very curious on what Gutenberg will come up with in the future?

Dominik: 1:23

Yeah, totally, and like maybe one more thing. So if you favor this like first approach of translating really just the content and have it in different languages, but you don't want to change the content or do anything other than translating, then you can also use like a Google translate or like some translation service. There are Google translate plugins that will just translate your entire site, depending on, or you don't even have to do it yourself, because in Chrome you get the functionality to translate a website.

Dominik: 1:54

And this might actually also work. So this is like really low cost alternative and a low effort alternative to all of these more complicated ones. Yeah, because in theory you could also do translation without an extra plugin, if you just had in your post type, if you would add, like, the meta fields for the translations and then render them depending on the language, right, so yeah, but, like when you have a machine translate your website, then I always think, why would you want to do this in the first place on your website?

Steffen: 2:29

because modern browsers usually do that for you, can do that for you, right. And the problem I have with with automatic translation is typically the quality isn't that high, so it's not representative for my brand, for example. I'd rather then collaborate with external companies. There are some plugins and service providers also who kind of like hook into your website or we can export easily all the translatable content and then actual people, supported, i guess, with AI or any kind of other system, will do the translations for you. So at least you can rely on a proper standard quality, though at the same time it's always, i feel, like much more about getting the right tone of voice out of it, and that still what's mostly harder for a machine to achieve, and even harder for a human being to achieve if they don't work closely together with you as a company with your brand to understand how to do that correctly. So I'm big fan of manual translations always.

Dominik: 3:34

Yes, i definitely agree, but as I is on the on the move right and is growing and getting better and better and deep L We've used also deep L before for some translations on WordPress sites. It is getting there and, if you have like, maybe there's a review process that you can do and you teach basically the AI to do translations in the way that you want them to be in. So I think it's always good to hire experts right and to work closely with them together, but I think more and more of these experts will work together with AI and maybe this will also like increase quality, reduce price and And make things more efficient for you than the long probably most likely absolutely, and I think that's a very interesting way and I'm told me into pursue that further.

Steffen: 4:31

At the same time, i just noticed, like Yesterday I was reading a blog post from a colleague who created that for our website and when I read it I quickly noticed that she was using AI to support a writing that blog article, and not in a bad way.

Steffen: 4:50

I still 100% improve that article and I think it's great. I just, with the experience that I've made so far, the current state of AI. I have seen certain patterns that an AI would use rather than you would be human being, or maybe I think it was more about personal touch that wasn't aligning with the person, or that was more like serving a general way and creating more general language, and certainly this is going to be much more improved in the future, but so far I just feel it's not quite there yet And I'm still at the point that it should be considered a helper tool. Of course, that you shouldn't entirely rely on. That's just again coming back to the topic of translations, where I feel I wouldn't feel comfortable entirely just relying on that to represent me, but to use it as a supporting tool to do these things much more quicker than before.

Dominik: 5:49

So, summing up, the best way to create multilingual WordPress websites depends totally on what you're trying to achieve Right, so you should first sit down and think about how you want to translate things. I think from a technical point of view, the cleanest and like solution is like this multi site approach. From a simplicity, just translating one one to one or having one to one translations is like the best thing. But if you want to have the best experience for your end user and you don't mind maybe some more difficult configuration or maybe issues you run into, then go with the fully, fully customizable, like integrated into, like one WordPress site approach.

Steffen: 6:36

Yeah.

Dominik: 6:37

Great.

Steffen: 6:37

Thanks, bye, all right, bye bye.

Siegfried, deploy!

WordPress × AI: The Future of Website Translations

Listen to this podcast on