I’ve been looking for a language translator plugin for WP for a while now. Found a few but they all either didn’t work at all, didn’t work with other plugins or weren’t very nice in terms of SEO.
The WordPress Global Translator saves the day. I’ve installed it on this blog as a test to make sure it works before installing it on my hearing aids site.
There’s a block of flags in the sidebar. If you use the plugin as a widget then you have the option to display the flags as a <table>, use CSS or show it as an image.
You can pick which external translation service you want to use – I’m using Google’s.
A nice feature is that the plugin has a page caching system so that you do not hit your selected translation service too often and get yourself banned from it.
In terms of SEO, it is spot on. Translated pages have a two character country code inserted into the URL, for example:
Translate www.steveify.com into Spanish and the URL becomes: www.steveify.com/es/
A nice touch is that if you explicitly ask to translate back to your default language the plugin will redirect to your normal URL rather than inserting the code of your language. So translating www.steveify.com into English goes back to www.steveify.com and not to www.steveify.com/en/
UPDATE AFTER LEAVING COMMENTS:
There’s a couple of problems with this plugin when leaving comments on posts:
- When a comment is submitted the page goes back to showing the default language version instead of the language the comment was entered in.
- After submitting a comment you get taken to a URL like: http://www.steveify.com/uncategorized/wordpress-global-translator-plugin/comment-page-1/#comment-462. If you now hit the translate button then it treats this as a different page.
Another nice feature of the plugin is that it allows you to set a time limit for how often your blog will access the translator app – another measure to prevent your site from hitting it too hard and getting banned. If someone tries to use the translator too oftern then they will be redirected to translate.google.com and so they will still see their page.
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