Have you ever thought of expanding your readership by offering your blog in more than one language. English is no doubt lingua franca but there are people who do not know English but could be interested in what you write.
Yes! The world is a tiny village now thanks to internet. We are just a click away from anybody, anywhere.
With WordPress, the task of translation becomes easy with use of plugins. There are many WordPress plugins that will help you get your message across.
When it comes to language, the plugins fall in two categories
- Translation Plugins – These plugins provide instant translations of your post content into other languages.
- Multilingual Blogging Plugins – These plugins allow bloggers to blog in more than one language.
If you want to blog in multiple language, multilingual blogging plugin is right choice for you. However if you write in just one language [which is the case most of the times], your need is translation -plugins.
Translation WordPress Plugins
These plugins help you to cross the language barrier and get your message across the continents. WordPress Plugins that translate your WordPress blog from one language to another help cross the language barrier that often divides us.
Global Translator WordPress Plugin
This plugin is from Nothing2Hide and is one of the most popular translation WordPress Plugins.On activation it allows you to put a small table of international flags in the sidebar or wherever you might desire. If you scroll below on this page, you would see it at the bottom of the sidebar.
When someone clicks the flag of interest whole of your blog including title would be translated to that langage.
Global Translator automatically translates your blog in the following 48 different languages: Italian, Korean, Chinese (Simplified), Portuguese, English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch, Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Norwegian, Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese,Albanian,Estonian,Galician,Maltese,Thai,Turkish,Hungarian.
The number of available translations will depend on your blog language and the translation engine you will chose to use.
You can control the placement of the flags within your WordPress Theme.
Google AJAX Translation
The Google AJAX Translation WordPress plugin provides a quick, simple, and light way to add translation to your blog. A “Translate” button can be added to the bottom or top of posts, pages, and/or comments. When the button is clicked a popup window opens showing a list of available languages.
You can choose which of the 52 languages to display in the Administration Panel. The list of languages can be shown as text (in the native language of each language), as flag icons, or as both.
The plugin detects the browser’s preferred language and shows the “Translate” button in that language if available. That language is listed first in the popup. The tooltip for each language is also translated into the browser’s preferred language.
These two plugis are best translation plugins that I have come across. Interestingly Globall translator also has a paid version which is available with Nothing 2 Hide membership.
Are you aware of any other tool. Please do share.
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Tags: increase your audience, multilingual blog, translate your blog, wordpress translation plugin
