Although English is a predominantly popular language in the world it is understood by just 20% of the world population. So without a multilingual website, we are missing the vast majority of the audience in the world. Fortunately, Google provides us with a completely free option to translate our content into more than 100 languages. Although Google translate is not a substitute for manual translation it still can be used as a viable option. If we are particularly specific about certain languages and have enough funds to provide for translation then it is always better to go for manual translation our blog content. In this blog, I will show how to add Google Translate to WordPress for free.
Step1: Install and activate the Translate WordPress plugin.
This is a very popular plugin with more than 100,000 active installs. Refer to my guide on the plugin installation for any clarifications.
Step2: Go to the WordPress dashboard settings section and click the Google Language Translator option.
In the settings page check the Plugin Status checkbox to activate the plugin. Also, select the default language of our website. Here I have selected English.
Now we have to select all the languages for translating our content using Google Translator. I have selected French, German and Spanish together with my default language.
Step3: Go to the Language Switcher Settings on the same page below.
Here we have different options to define the color, width and background color of our language switcher bar. Also if we want to display the flags corresponding to the countries for the languages that we have selected before check the Show flag images checkbox. Other options in this section include selecting the layout for the Language switcher and enabling or disabling Google branding. Select these options as per our requirement.
Step4: Now go to the Floating Widget section on the same page below.
This option is for enabling or disabling a floating widget that shows the different language options for switching the content language. I have disabled this widget as I am going to add a custom widget for the translate option in the next step. Click the Save Changes button at the bottom.
Step5: Let us now add the widget to a suitable position on our website. For this go to Appearance=> Widgets. We can see the Google Language Translator widget in the available widgets section.
I have added this widget to the primary sidebar. Provide a suitable title and click Done.
Step6: Now let us go to our blog and view the default content.
We can now select another language from the drop-down in the widget. This will automatically translate our content into the selected language.
Thus in a few simple steps, we have added Google Translate on our WordPress website.
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