Translating WordPress Theme for a Multilingual Website with ConveyThis

Of all the websites on the internet, you should not be surprise that some 37% are being powered by WordPress. That you are reading this article is an indicator that points to the fact that your website is powered by WordPress and you are interested in ways you can improve translation.

However, most of the contents of a WordPress theme is in English language. That doesn’t follow the trends of languages that are preferred on the internet. For example, languages other than English accounted for some 75% preference of the internet. This will help you to see that you can boast of a better website that can accommodate audiences from different locations around the world having different languages when you decides to translate your WordPress theme into their dialects.

Then if that is the case, let us delve into more details of WordPress translation.

The pathway to international success is translation

It would be detrimental if you don’t translate as well as localize your website and its content if you are selling on the global scale. However, many have the fear of how they will go about localizing their website. Such fear is understandable because you are not the first and not going to be the last to struggle with the thought of localizing. This is so true especially when you are trying to penetrate deep into market in far territories India, Eastern and western Africa.

Well, you will be glad to know that you don’t have to worry that much. This is because there is this SaaS solution that is quite easy to use and will help you to transform your website into a website with multiple languages. This SaaS solution is ConveyThis. With the use of ConveyThis, you don’t need to hire a web developer or to learn coding before you can use it to transform your website into a multilingual website.

Better means to translate WordPress theme

The fact is that you can always translate WordPress theme outside ConveyThis but those options are not as easy and convenient as ConveyThis. Those options come with challenges that may impede your success of the translation project. For example, in the past you will have to go through a manual process of creating another theme that is compatible and you start downloading its files i.e. translation file, MO files, POT files etc. before you can successfully translate a WordPress website. As if that is not enough, you need to install operating system based software that is/are needed for the editing. Example of such software is gettext.

If you are taking a look at this old approach from a developer’s point of view i.e. theme developer, you will notice that you must translate each and every string of text and then upload them manually to the theme. Hence the theme you are creating or about to create must be one that has multilingual integration. With all these, you would still have to be maintenance conscious.

You will agree with me that this old approach is not efficient, time consuming, not easy to maintain, and can be cost intensive. You have much to do before you can get a better result. You must dig deeper into the WordPress theme so that it will be easy for you to access and make the editing of the text strings. Another sad thing about it is that error detection and error correction are difficult process in the old approach. You will have to do a whole lot of work for you to be able to make the corrections when you discover the need for such.

Well, like it is mentioned earlier, ConveyThis will simplify all these processes for you and even take charge of it all with you doing little to nothing at all. ConveyThis is not only compatible with plugins available for WordPress as well as Woocommerce but also have the capability of translating any WordPress theme.

Benefits/advantages of using ConveyThis for translation

Having discussed much on the old approach to translating your WordPress theme, let us now highlight some of the benefits of using ConveyThis for the translation of your WordPress theme.

1. A combination of machine and human translation: it is true that you can have your contents translated within few seconds but sometimes the machine may not have produce the desired result. ConveyThis will translate your contents automatically and still avail you the opportunity to manually give fine touches to what has been translated. If you decide to modify and improve the machine suggestions, you can always do that manually.

The translation task done by ConveyThis is an improved and enhanced one because it blends machine learning from the likes of Google Translate, DeepL, Yandex, and Microsoft for several languages it translates.

Although our machine translation is usually right with the basics, yet ConveyThis allows you to add collaborators on your ConveyThis dashboard or if you don’t have one, you can always hire a professional from ConveyThis to join you on the go.

With this combination of machine and human effort in your translation project you can expect a nice output for your WordPress website.

2. You will have access to Visual Editor: ConveyThis offers you an editor where you can manually edit the translation of your WordPress theme. The advantage of this is that you can always preview the website and see how it will appear and then make necessary adjustment if need be to text strings so that they don’t affect the entire design of your web page.

3. Assured multilingual SEO: there is no benefit having a website that cannot be easily found when there is a search for its contents on the search engines. ConveyThis will make this possible by translating the URLs of your website. It will automatically give subdirectories to the languages that your website is translated into.

To illustrate this, assuming your website is translated into Vietnamese, it will automatically have a VN subdomain such that once a visitor from Vietnam visits the website, the website can automatically be in that language. This simple trick will help to improve user experience, brings about more engagements, and most importantly your website we rank higher for search engines in case someone from any parts of the world is looking for things that can be found on the website.

How to translate a WordPress theme using ConveyThis

Here, we will be discussing how you can install ConveyThis as well as set it up on your WordPress website. Immediately this is done, you can be assured of translation of your WordPress theme within few minutes.

You may also want to know that ConveyThis has integration with Shopify, Squarespace, and WooCommerce. This is interesting!

Follow the steps below:

Install ConveyThis for your theme translation

On your WordPress dashboard after you log on to it, add a new plugin. You can quickly input ‘ConveyThis’ into the search box and on locating it, click it and install it. In order to activate this, you will receive a mail that contains a link to your API code. Keep this API code save as it will be needed to help set up your translation app.

Start translating your WordPress theme

From that your WordPress admin panel, it is possible to select the languages you are targeting and you want your website to be available in. ConveyThis will offer you a forever free option for sites smaller than 2,500 words, 1 translated language, 2,500 translated words, 10,000 monthly page views, machine translation, with no credit card required.

When you explore the paid options, you can increase the number of languages you want to translate your website into as well as the number of words on the website.

Once you have choose the languages you wants your WordPress theme to translate into, it automatically translates the theme into it. Also, you may want to customize the language button on your website. This button makes it easy for visitors of your website to quickly switch between languages of their choice. You may want the button to display names of the languages or the flag of the country the language represented and place it where you think will be more fitting for your website either in the menu or navigation bar.

Enhance your translation with the help of other collaborators

Like it has earlier been mentioned in this article, you can always collaborate with others to fine tune your WordPress theme translation. Sometimes, you may not be sure of the output of the machine translations or probably you are not satisfied with output. When this happens, you can always ask for collaborators or professional translator from ConveyThis to join you from your dashboard. This professionals will help you get the best output you can ever think of.

Preview your website with the Visual Editor

To avoid the issues of texts overrunning their positions, you can quickly preview the work of translation done from the visual editor so as to see how the website will eventually look like. And if there is need for adjustments, you can manually do that with the visual editor.

In conclusion, if you follow this step by step guide in translating your WordPress website, you can be assured of increase visitors on your website, more engagements, and increased conversions. Translate and localize your WordPress theme today with easy by using ConveyThis.