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

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Transcript

Intro

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

Translating With Google Translate

Dominik 1:24

, 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

Bridging the Quality Gap

Steffen 2:34

. 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

Teaching AI your Tone of Voice

Dominik 3:38

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

Mastering Multilingual WordPress Websites

Steffen 5:49

.

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 .