WordPress (WP) has evolved a long way from the journalist-loving blogging platform it once was to becoming a powerful CMS of choice for many SME’s. What it lacks in out-of-the-box functionality is compensated for with the vast selection of user-contributed plugins, which evolve practically at the pace of the web itself.
Matt Mullenweg (all hail) & the team beautifully balance the division between core functionality and community contributed functional extension, making it elegantly simple to learn. Making a platform so usable means that marketers can use it in as much anger as the journo’ types.
One functionality omission is multilingual & locale support, whereby you have two options:
- Deploy & maintain various instances of WordPress (one for each language & locale) – this is not a complex as it might sound, but does require more work than to:
- Use a plugin such as qTranslate
qTranslate was developed by the contributor Qian Qin, who lives in Berlin. Thanks Qian! In true spirit, he’s done a fantastic job of making the plugin easy & simple to use. He actively maintains it & checks for compatibility issues with other plugins & WordPress updates.
Once qTranslate is configured, you have a powerful multilingual CMS at your fingertips. However, WordPress needs freshly ‘Pressed’ multilingual content, so if you don’t have a professional translator at hand and want professional content, then you can use the in-plugin services to buy professional translation without ever leaving WordPress! qTranslate has been integrated to work with the professional translation service: Translate English to French, Spanish, German and Portuguese – all of these languages, and more, can be quoted on, bought and paid for from within the plugin. Cool I hear you say! Okay… that’s enough plugging the plugin (sorry if that pun made you cringe!)
The translation process is oh-so-simple…
- qTranslate sends the text (including any tags) to the server
- It then gets automatically allocated to an experienced professional linguist who is notified to log in & provide the translation
- The translator takes a few hours (depending on length) to undertake the translation, then checks through their translation before submitting it to the website for validation (which checks the integrity of the tags)
- The translation is automatically pushed into the correct part of qTranslate
- If the post is already published the translation will immediately ‘go live’
There’s no need to verify the integrity of the HTML tags, or to copy & paste the translations in – Live Translation will return the translated text directly to WordPress, so it will automatically appear online, as if like multilingual magic. – Did you just fall off your chair in amazement?!
Think of it as 3-click-translation. Well, actually its 4 to go back from your PayPal confirmation page to WP, but you get the idea. Ok, easy on the salivation, go download the plugin
– just enable the languages you want, go to ‘Edit post’ & click the text next to the flag for each language on the right hand side.
Happy users include:
- http://www.daco-solutions.com/
- http://inside.patriziapepe.com/
- http://www.gamesjobschina.com
- http://www.ready2climb.com/
- http://www.schaeferglas.com/
- http://www.addon.tv/
- http://www.rvf400.de/
- http://www.interactivenordic.com/
- http://www.gamesjobsjapan.com/
- http://www.gamesjobsgermany.com/
- http://www.gamesjobsfrance.com/
- http://www.ontilt.se/
For more help & advice on anything multilingual, call: +44 (0) 113 8150460, or email sales[at]livetranslation[dot]com
13 March 2012 20:44