In the last few years, machine translation has greatly improved and now it’s available via WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor.
When you use our Advanced Translation Editor, you’ll see a new button Translate automatically. This will automatically translate the entire document. You can choose if all sentences will auto-complete, or wait “incomplete” for your review.
Some great things about this machine translation engine:
- It’s fast
- It supports HTML tags
- It uses a neural network engine, so it learns
- It’s available in in Web’s most popular languages
Of course, we’re not writing our own machine translation engine. After a lot of review and comparison, we’ve settled on Azure’s MT engine. We’re also refining the way we use it. Since WPML allows you to edit translations, we’ll be able to feed these edits to the MT engine, so that translations can dramatically improve. This is work in progress, but it’s already pretty great.
Machine translation is right now available inside the Advanced Translation Editor. While it’s in beta, it’s also free. Folks with renewal plans will continue to have complementary access to this great new editor when it comes out of beta. We’ll arrange very convenient pricing for people with Lifetime accounts.
We’d love to get your feedback. Give it a go and let us know in the comments.
Would love to see this with Google Translate.
From our own tests and quite a lot of comparisons that we read, the translation quality is mostly identical. Google Translate costs over x2 more and we don’t want to roll this onto clients. Google’s been getting a bit expensive on other fronts too (see their price bump for Google Maps).
Deepl outperform most other services:
https://www.deepl.com/translator
the politic about the lifetime accounts to add new services and then charge them is not exactly what promised with the lifetime accounts. we paid for the full version for lifetime…
Thanks for the tip about Deepl. Have you made comparisons between it, Azure and Google and found that it’s superior?
not by myself. i am not good enough in other languages to do it. but the results i testet have been great and here is a statement form TC:
“Tech giants Google, Microsoft and Facebook are all applying the lessons of machine learning to translation, but a small company called DeepL has outdone them all and raised the bar for the field.
Its translation tool is just as quick as the outsized competition, but more accurate and nuanced than any we’ve tried.”TechCrunchUSA
“the politic about the lifetime accounts to add new services and then charge them is not exactly what promised with the lifetime accounts.”
nailed it!
I compared deepl against Google Translate and now against your implemented Azure Service. For translations from English to German Deepl is truely on another level. Not 100% sure how its the other way around as I am native German.
Thanks for taking the time to do this review. It helps a lot. We can’t switch to Deepl right now, but it’s good to know that it produces great translations to German.
Dito, lifetime full access to everything means lifetime full access to everything.
However, your price for this service for lifetime customer will need to be really REALLY affordable. If you can’t, might I suggest this service activation per website, with a uber low price.
Ditto, full version lifetime is lifetime of full version ! ! !
This is the reason people don’t take “lifetime” seriously and this hurts the whole industry. You are basically saying you don’t honor your contracts.
DeepL are the guys behind Linguee. And my experience is: it is impressive and does outperform everything else. The API seems open. I can’t wait to see someone get it into wordpress.
Hi, thank you for such a wonderful option. Would the same be available for string translations? At least with suggested translation to pick from or help translators to manage strings.
Actually, you can send strings for translation and then translate them with machine translation.
https://wpml.org/documentation/translating-your-contents/how-to-translate-strings/
Tried it?
hi there, checked it and looks quite reliable. Tried translating from English into Italian a blog post and the quality of the MT engine seems ok. Compared it with DeepL, our current benchmark, and it seems comparable.
One problem: the editor does not recognize the edits we carried out on a machine-translated string so when we got to another string that was completely identical the changes were not impelemented.
Keep up the good work!
Andrea
So I found that the Advanced Translation Editor is going to cost $ 8,- per translator per month. I have a few questions about that.
1) Is that also per website? I have multiple clients with a multi lingual website. Can I assign the same Advanced Translation Editor user to multiple websites?
2) How is this going to work if my clients want to do their own translation? I can sign them up as a user, but after a website has been translated, it pretty much stays the same. They might only change a few thing now and then. Not enough to justify a monthly subscription.
Thanks
JP
Pricing for this translation editor is not final yet. We’re planning to charge per website/language combination, but this can change.
This cost is intended not for people who build the sites but for the people who run the sites or translate them. Our clients will receive complementary access to this translation editor, together with the yearly renewal. Clients with Lifetime accounts will need to pay a small yearly addition for this, to cover the cost of using the machine translation (which is far from free).
Your point about clients needing to do small edits is good. Like I said, we haven’t finalized any payments yet. In any case, it’s possible to move from one translation editor to another. You can translate a page with the new translation editor and your clients can edit it with WPML’s built-in translation editor. There’s no conflict.
Hi Amir,
At least “Machine Translation” feature will be available for Lifetime Users?
Clients with Lifetime accounts will continue getting everything EXCEPT the new Advanced Translation Editor. This includes downloads, updates and support. The reason is, every account in this translation editor costs us (for the machine translation). We already priced it in for the yearly renewals. You probably noticed that the cost of yearly renewals went up from $39 to $59. This accounts for the cost of the machine translation in the new translation editor. We still don’t have pricing for access to this translation editor for Lifetime account holders, once the editor goes out of beta.
Oh ok.
Is there anyway, we can add “Machine Translation” by our-self using our API accounts at Google Translator, Microsoft, etc?
I like the “Machine Translation” UI.
It’s a good idea, but I don’t know how feasible it is to implement. It’s our server which makes the API calls and not the browser.
i have tested the new editor now for different pages and strings
german & english in use
from german -> english = nearly very good
from english -> german = often not usable/horrible result
the optical interface & how it works -> good job
would be great if you could do here also at the default translation editor some updates
lets have a look for the further development of the new editor – if the fee is not to much, maybe i will use it – also if there are better results for english->german translations
Thanks for your feedback. We ran language tests also and we know that machine translation is not yet perfect. It’s improving rapidly. In the near future, we’re going to add clustering and language feedback, which should improve the machine translation inside projects. This is new to all of us and we’re still learning. It’s why our Advanced Translation Editor is in beta right now.
Hi there, I wanted to try the new machine translation feature in my local install, but I have been unable to figure out how to activate the advanced translation editor (my admin displays in spanish). Can you help me with some more detailed steps?
Thanks!
Eva
have you seen this page?
https://wpml.org/documentation/translating-your-contents/advanced-translation-editor/
is it available for all language like Arabic language and what is the step to take this new service for lifetime accounts
Azure machine translation is available to/from Arabic. Right now, it’s free and you can use it without restrictions. When it gets out of beta (in a few months), we’ll also know the pricing that we can offer it.
When I translate a post in English and get to 100%, it takes time before it appears in my dashboard (on the English side). And when it appears, it’s been posted already!!! I don’t understand. Why you guys never have a complete step by step on how to use your new feature. We always have to figure everything by ourself!
Thanks for bringing this up. Returning translations shouldn’t take a long time. We’re going to double check the process and the feedback that the editor is giving. We can definitely improve both the speed and the feedback.
How about that it posts directly when done translating?
Yes, we’re working to make this happen. Our Advanced Translation Editor is a new tool. We launched it in beta (free) and we’re learning a lot. We’re doing our very best to apply conclusions quickly.