Translation for Visitor Comments
The greatest challenge in running a multilingual site is moderating comments and replying to visitors. Without actively participating in the discussing, it’s impossible to build a community around your blog.
With WPML, managing multilingual comments is exactly like doing it in your language. WPML will translate all visitor comments to your language and translate back your replies.
How WPML’s comments translation works
Supposing you’ve written a blog post in English and translated it to Spanish.
Sofi reads it and leaves a comment in Spanish:
Me gusta esta idea. ¿Dónde puedo leer más acerca de su nuevo programa?
When you go to WordPress dashboard, you see a new message. But, it’s not in Spanish. For you, it’s waiting in English:
I like this idea. Where can I read more about your new program?
You reply to Sofi, in English:
I’m glad to hear that. Have a look in the services section or contact me via our contact page to discuss this offline.
and your reply appears in Spanish:
Me complace escuchar eso. Mire la sección de servicios o contáctese conmigo por medio de nuestra página de contacto para hablar del tema fuera de Internet.
Hey! We’re having conversations with people in their language. How did that happen?
When Sofi left her reply in Spanish, WPML sent it for automatic machine translation. It’s free and works instantly. This doesn’t give the most accurate translation, but it’s free and instant and you can understand what visitors are saying.
On the other hand, when you reply, the same translator who translates the site for you will do the translation. This provides excellent translation and will read like you’re speaking the language (this feature requires using professional translation).
We can’t use free machine translation to translate your replies because they’re published for everyone to see. Machine translation gives reasonable results, but is not going to produce texts you can be proud of.
How much does it cost?
Translation for visitor comments to your language is free. This is done by a machine (Google) and doesn’t require any work from anyone (besides 10,000 engineers working for Google). You will be able to understand visitor comments and moderate them.
Translating your replies costs 0.07 USD / word.
Setting up comments translation
Go to WPML->Comments translation.

Comments translation controls
You can enable comment translation per user. There’s a separate control for translating visitor comments and for translation replies.
To select your language (the language to which visitor comments are translated), go to your profile page. At the bottom, you’ll find a new section which lets you select your language.
Me gusta esta idea. ¿Dónde puedo leer más acerca de su nuevo programa?
I’m glad to hear that. Have a look in the services section or contact me via our contact page to discuss this offline.
Hello, if someone writes a comment in a spanish page, is there a way to watch it in the english page too, because, i see that the comments only show in one language, when i switch to the other language i dont see any comment…
Hope to get a reply and thanks in advance.
WPML doesn’t do that. Comments on each language would show separately. There’s a plugin that someone else wrote to merge comments:
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wpml-comment-merging/
We don’t use it, but others say that it works fine.
Hello,
It seems the plugin (wpml comment merging) doesn’t work anymore because of the comment filtering in the newest version of wpml.
To me it is not important whether the comments are translated or not, but it is VERY important that they are merged for all languages.
Is there a way for me to de-activate comment filtering so that wpml comment merging will work again?
Or can I get an older version of WPML?
Thanks a lot !
The comments are saved per posts. Each comment is attached to one post only.
By ‘merged’ do you mean that you want comments to show to all translations?
Yes, that’s it.
I want that if someone comments on the english version of a post, his comment also displays under the french version of this post. This is what the plugin did.
I want translate to VietNamese. How could i do?
Hi, i have bought a version in where the translation of comments in disabled. Why is this so?
We had to disable it because Google blocked this API completely. We’re working to re-enable this feature, but it will require registration in Google and a small payment to Google for a key to translation API.
any clue on the issue Blandine stated above about merging two pages with different language comments?
We’re adding comments sync into WPML 2.5.0. It should be ready very soon now.
Check this out, this resolved my problem
1) Install WPML Comment Merging
2) Change the function code as explained here: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/plugin-wpml-comment-merging-amends-to-make-wpml-comment-merging-work-again