When you decide to put your blog online with WordPress, you have two ways to go. Self-hosted WordPress and WordPress.com are not the same things, and you will have to know the differences before you register accounts and reach into your wallets to pay for hosting. If you plan on translating your website, you should also take extra caution when choosing your WordPress solution.
As you may already know, there are more than a few plugins and services that allow you to translate your site. But since WordPress.com doesn't let you install additional plugins, you may think you're in trouble. But wait; before you start panicking, stay with us because we're about to prove you wrong!
In this article, we're about to show you three methods to translate wordpress.com website.
1. The old school way
If you ask search engines for help when it comes to translating wordpress.com website, one of the first things you will see is the article about setting a multilingual blog. Although the article shows you three ways of achieving practically the same thing, all three are outdated and will ask you to do the same thing twice.
If you decide to go with the old school way, you will be able to translate a site to another language only if you manually retype the entire text. This might be a good idea if you have a simple brochure website with the minimum amount of text and maybe just a few posts. But what if you need to translate the entire site to more than just one language? What if you have hundreds of posts? In that case, you better call Tom Cruise because it's mission impossible.
2. Google Translate Widget
Since you probably can't reach Tom this time, you must have searched for another solution. Luckily, a few months ago, WordPress.com developers introduced a simple Google Translate Widget that you can use on your website.
The widget is as simple as possible; you just need to select it from the list, give it a title and save changes. After that, your visitors will be able to choose any language from the list. Or if you are a bit more advanced user, you can send your visitors directly to the desired language by using specialized URLs. To learn more about this, we suggest reading the article about Google Translate Widget.
Although the widget will translate your site to practically any language, you probably already know how good an automatic translation is. But wait, you still have a better option if you want to translate wordpress.com website the right way. Keep on reading.
3. Translating WordPress.com website with GTranslate
If you follow WP Loop, you might remember that we reviewed GTranslate not that long time ago. Although this fantastic service works nicely even as a free WordPress plugin, you will be interested in the extra features it offers. Of course, if you host your site at WordPress.com, you can forget about installing the plugin, but we will show you the way around that.
The power of GTranslate
GTranslate can work independently on the platform you're using. So, even if you can't install the plugin, you can use GTranslate on your wordpress.com website!
It offers translation proxy solution which allows translation of any website hosted on any server by simply adding a DNS record. That means you can get any translation for any website since this is controlled on a network level.
Get the most out of your translated wordpress.com site
Now that you know what's GTranslate capable of, you can forget about manually translating each post. You can even forget about Google's automatic translation widget. Instead of all that, you can easily translate the entire wordpress.com website like a professional.
Depending on the plan you choose, you can:
- Have all the languages
- Edit the translations quickly from the user-friendly interface
- Translate URLs
- Host languages on top level domains
- Translate metadata
- Have your translated sites indexed by search engines
To learn more about the service, please see our GTranslate review. We also suggest that you take a closer look at the service on the official website.
Another amazing thing about using GTranslate is that, even if you decide to transfer your wordpress.com site to a self-hosted option, you can continue using the service like nothing happened! In that case, you would just need to install the plugin and tweak a few things if you changed the domain name. Fantastic, isn't it?!
The post How to translate WordPress.com website the right way appeared first on WP Loop.
