Effortlessly translate WordPress sites: How to take the headache out of translating web content

When it comes to website localization, many people don’t know where to start. Publishing and content platforms are not always internationalized – meaning you couldn’t translate your content even if you wanted to. And even if a publishing platform did come with multilingual support, you often had to localize content in roundabout ways; for example, duplicating pages or copy-and-pasting content. This becomes exponentially more challenging when you have lots of frequently-updated content.

Not fun, to say the least.

Our vision for Transifex Live

Our vision for Transifex Live was to do for localization what Google Analytics did for website analytics: make localization easy and accessible for content creators of all types. With a single snippet of JavaScript, Transifex Live enabled you to translate WordPress websites and online documentation without any platform or engineering dependencies, or complex system integrations.

By eliminating the need to internationalize code, manage files, and track frequently changing web content, Transifex Live made it possible for anyone to create multilingual sites and reach customers in their native language. Today, we’re excited to take our vision a step further with our Transifex Live integration with WordPress.

Transifex Live Multilingual WordPress Plugin

WordPress is by far the most popular Content Management System out there, owning nearly half of the CMS market. We use it for the Transifex website (product tour, blog, etc.), as do many of our users. But it doesn’t offer multilingual support out-of-the-box.

After seeing several members of our community build Transifex Live plugins for WordPress, we decided to join forces and create an official Transifex Live WordPress plugin. A big thanks to Brian Miyaji from ThemeBoy and Ayebare Mucunguzi from Zanto!

With the plugin, you can:

• Integrate Transifex Live into your WordPress site without modifying any themes or templates.
• Auto-detect the browser locale and load the matching translations, e.g. visitors from France will see your content in French.
• Automatically identify new/updated content and pages on your site.
• Choose where the language selector appears: top left, top right, bottom left, or bottom right corner of your site.
• Customize the language switcher by choosing your own color scheme.

Unlike other existing solutions for translating WordPress sites or blogs, the Transifex Live plugin doesn’t require you to create one language per post, insert language tags manually, or host separate instances for each language. Plus, by using Transifex Live together with the WordPress plugin, you can also use all the other translation and collaboration tools in the Transifex platform, including Translation Memory, Glossary, ordering translations, to name a few.

To get the Transifex Live WordPress translation plugin, visit the WordPress Plugin directory or GitHub repository.

There’s more…

We didn’t stop after our WordPress plugin. If you go to our documentation, you’ll now find Integration Guides that walk you through how to use Transifex Live to translate content on a number of CMS, documentation, help desk, e-commerce, and blogging platforms. You don’t use only one tool for your company or organization, so we didn’t stop at one integration guide 🙂

Currently, there are guides for:

• Bigcommerce
• Desk.com
• Freshdesk
• Ghost
• Help Scout Docs
• Lander
• Shopify
• Webflow
• Unbounce

And just like using Transifex Live with WordPress, using Transifex Live with these platforms means there’s no complex system integrations or need to deal with files. You also get the ability to translate in-context and publish translation without waiting for deploys. Best of all, keeping translations up to date is no longer a challenge.

We hope you find the WordPress plugin and Integration Guides helpful in getting started with localizing your web content with Transifex Live. This is just the start!