WPML’s revolutionary new translation engine is here! It sets a new standard for multilingual WordPress sites by analyzing your whole content for context and unparalleled accuracy.
Update: WPML AI is Now Available!
WPML AI, our most powerful machine translation engine powered by ChatGPT, is now available for use! Visit the official WPML AI page to learn how to enable it on your website.
Why WPML AI is a Game Changer
WPML AI harnesses the power of OpenAI’s API, combined with our proprietary technology, to deliver translations that truly understand your content.
Unlike traditional engines that translate sentence by sentence, WPML AI analyzes your entire content to ensure accuracy and context. This holistic approach results in translations that are not just literal but also nuanced and culturally relevant.
Our extensive testing across various content types—technical, narrative-driven, and more—revealed that WPML AI outperforms all other engines. Native speakers rated its translations as perfect or near-perfect.
WPML AI is Cost-Effective and Efficient
WPML AI provides high-quality translations at a fraction of the cost of human translation. You can now truly have affordable translations with top-level quality.
For example, translating a typical website with content of 10,000 words into 2 languages would cost around 47€.
Currently Supported Languages
WPML AI currently supports translating content from English to German, Spanish, French, Portuguese, and Italian.
It is currently not possible to translate from other languages to English. We are aware this is highly-requested and are already working on making this possible.
We’re also already working on adding more language pairs.
Update: Why It’s Not Possible to Use Your Own API Key
We got several questions and comments asking if it’s possible to use your own API key from OpenAI or connect to other Large Language Model (LLM) solutions. There is a very important and simple reason for this that we want to clarify.
While AI models are good at translating content they are not good at respecting various formats and standards that WordPress and websites in general require. When you send a WordPress page for translation, it consists of various HTML tags and elements and AI models tend to remove a lot of that markup or simply break it.
If WPML would just send your content to OpenAI or other AI APIs, your pages would break in many cases. And in other ones, it would get an invalid response because LLMs sometimes respond with a question instead of an actual translation.
And this brings us to the importance of what WPML does when it sends your content to OpenAI and other translation engines. We make sure the HTML structure stays intact and as it needs to be. We also take care of many additional linguistic aspects like capitalization and name-checking. All of this requires significant development, maintenance, and server resources which is why it cannot be provided free of charge.
How to Start Using WPML AI
To get started, go to WPML → Translation Management, click the Tools tab and then expand the Automatic translation engines section. Drag and drop the WPML AI (beta) engine to the top of the list.
Making WPML AI the default translation engine
That’s it, you can now enjoy the translations provided by our new cutting-edge translation engine!
Coming Next – Meet Maiya, Your AI Translation Assistant
But wait, there’s more! Soon, we’ll be introducing Maiya, an AI-powered translation assistant designed to further refine your translation experience.
Maiya will interact with you, asking the kind of insightful questions a human translator would, to ensure the translations are tailored to your specific needs.
Ultimately, this synergy between WPML AI and Maiya promises to deliver Better Than Human Translations.
Here’s a sneak preview of Maiya in action:
Maiya asks questions to improve the quality of your automatic translations
We’d Love to Hear Your Thoughts!
We’re excited to introduce WPML AI and eager to hear your thoughts and about your experience after trying the WPML AI engine.
Your feedback is invaluable to us as we continue to improve and expand WPML’s features.
64 Responses to “Introducing WPML AI – Superior Translation Engine for WordPress”
Wow, sounds promising.
I need to try this!
Thanks, Marius! Yes, please try it out and let us know how it goes! 🙂
When you will add new language pairs? I’m particularly interested in Spanish > English
Hi, Juanjo! Yes, we are aware that translating from other languages into English is a much requested feature so we’re working really hard on providing this feature. That being said, the code for this is actually ready and we’re now in the testing phase. As I wrote in this post, we always do a very deep testing for all features and we must be sure everything is working as expected. So, if no big issues are found, it could be ready in the coming weeks, but if by any chance we encounter any big issues, it could be longer. Again, we know this is important and we’re prioritizing it.
Dear Dario
Do you have any road map on when or in which order you plan to release new language pairs? We do have some bigger projects in the pipeline where we are interested in
DE > EN
DE > FR
DE > IT
looking forward to hearing from you!
Hi! I cannot give you a definite answer, but if all goes well, I think the ones you’re asking about could happen in the coming weeks (i.e. September). But again, this is just my own estimate at this time, it’s not an official ETA.
Does or will WPML offer a Latin American or Mexican Spanish instead of the Spain Spanish?
Hi, Yvonne! At this point, only Spain Spanish is supported. We might add other variants of Spanish in the future but we cannot really say when. We have a ton of other world languages to add first before looking into specific language variants.
Is it possible to receive a notification when Dutch is added?
Hi, Nelson! There isn’t a specific email list reserved only for those interested in Dutch translation via WPML AI. But for sure, once we add more languages we’ll send out a newsletter about it.
The translations are great, but 4 translation credits is a lot! 3 credits would be tolerable.
Hi Dmitry! The price in credits was determined by many factors, from the OpenAI API price to the cost of our own technology running on top of it. In other words, it’s not random and it reflects the difference between general costs involved with getting to such a high-quality results. We (and many people switching to it right now) believe it’s more than worth the price.
its possible to connect my own API to it?
Hi, Michal! It is not possible to connect your own OpenAI API key to WPML AI translation engine because we’re not only sending and receiving content but also applying our own language enhancements on top of it. OpenAI API is great for translations but with our own tech on top of it, it’s even better.
Why is it so expensive? I am currently using the free version of GPT Chat and it helps with translations very well, and you are asking for as much as 4 credits. It would be better if you lowered the price to 1 credit, then you would take the request turnover and it would bring more profit.
Hi, Volodymyr! As I explained in the post, WPML is not simply sending content to OpenAI API and retrieving its translations. We run our own language algorithms before sending the content and then we apply another batch once we receive the translations from OpenAI API. The translations from OpenAI API are great but with our tech on top of it, they truly become state of the art. Of course, all of this required tons of development and it requires powerful servers to run it, plus, we take care of it all for you on-the-fly. This is why the price is higher than DeepL and Google Translate, and higher than simply sending stuff to OpenAI API.
You say that you not only receive data from OpenAI and that I hope it is correct but now I ask why you don’t give us the possibility to only send and receive data from open ai ? Hahaha the people not ask you to create WPML ai they ask integration of OpenAI. This is only stuf to let the people pay more for the same thing and yes I now that you want get money it is ok but you here have take the price and ad x4 it is not the right way. You use the wrong method it is not a good deal 4 token.
Hi, Sascha! I suggest checking out our post about upcoming Better Than Human Translation. WPML AI translation engine is the first of two features that together will enable WPML to translate your site better than humans do – at a fraction of a cost (i.e. 4 credits per word). In other words, we want to go beyond simply connecting you to DeepL or OpenAI, we want to provide a tool that gives you the ultimate translation quality – better than the one you get when you pay 10 times (or more) for human translation.
I am WPML’s Content Manager and my team is using WPML AI on all our production and test sites and all of us (and a ton of clients I’ve talked to, for example, on numerous WordCamps across the world) are just waiting for more language pairs. Then, that’s all we need – it’s that good. I could write a whole post about how time and money consuming it used to be to translate WPML.org. All of that is gone now, and I can spend my time on other things.
That being said, we really appreciate your constructive feedback and I will share all comments with the team and the management.
You didn’t really answer my question, but okay. You mentioned that it’s different from a simple API call, so now I’m asking: what are the differences? What justifies the significant price increase? I think you could provide us with more information, or am I mistaken? Additionally, why not offer the OpenAI API as a second option for experts? Or am I wrong in thinking that could be an option?
Thanks for the follow-up comment Sascha. I didn’t realize you were asking me for details about what our algorithms do on top of OpenAI’s API. Naturally, I cannot go into technical details (as this is our proprietary technology) but a big part of it stems from the fact that all languages are different and one way of saying something in English, for example, will simply sound awkward or just wrong in, for example, Spanish. And then, there are hundreds of language-specific details like capitalizing words or making a difference between names and proper nouns. In other words, we are checking and applying a ton of linguistic rules for each supported language. Besides this, you know that ChatGPT is prone to simply making stuff up when it’s not sure about the “correct” answer. Well, it can do the same when translating content and this is also something our engine looks out for.
When I said I will share all comments with the team, yes, I also meant your suggestion about simply providing OpenAI API as a simple translation engine. If we decide to do it, we will announce it just like other engines.
Just a few thoughts about AI.
My thoughts in general are two-fold. On the one hand I understand that AI can be a very great help to assist us doing things that else take a lot of time. And it’s kind of unavoidable in the years to come, so we better learn to use it the right way.
On the other hand I have my doubts about AI, especially when it comes down to creative processes. Writing texts from scratch, like I do almost daily, is very intuitive and while translating texts into German with a befriended and like-minded woman who understands exactly what I try to express, I’ve noticed that texts, when auto-translation (including AI routines) is involved it can do a great job, but usually misses the point, yet the text looks very good. But the essence of what I try to write is lost. And usually only by reading the text out loud and talking it over with someone else the flaws become visible/audible.
This is because AI makes use of what’s already there on the internet. For business-like texts and other none-creative information one can use AI, saving lots of time. But… over the years all these texts begin to read hollow, impersonal, empty, more of the same.
When creativity comes into play then AI is to be used wisely and always to be checked thoroughly. It doesn’t create by itself, although it seems to do so. By letting AI take more and more out of our hands, the danger is that ‘we’ lose creativity, making us poorer.
Best be aware of this, when making use of it.
Hi, Wim, thanks for sharing your insightful thoughts. From my experience, translating more creative content is more challenging for both humans and AI. We sometimes had to resend and correct texts translated by humans, multiple times. So, it’s just comes down to the complexity of the source text. However, in our testing, we found that our new WPML AI engine performs really well in such challenging and creative context as well. Additionally, we believe that together with Maiya, our upcoming AI translation assistant, the translations will match or outperform human translators. This is why it would be amazing to hear your feedback about how WPML AI and Maiya together perform with your content (once we release Maiya, which should be soon). It is possible you’ll still prefer working with a human, and that’s perfectly fine, we know there will always be cases and niches where that will be the preferred option. However, there is also a fair chance that you might be (pleasantly) surprised by the quality of WPML’s AI translations. If you try it out, please let us know (examples would be awesome).
Hi, this is a great development at exactly a great moment for our online magazine.
We are testing and the first thing I noticed is that when translating from English to Italian and to Spanish and from Spanish to English, every translated sentence is followed by a hard return.
When translating English to German there are no hard return problems.
Would be great if that can be fixed…
Oh and please add Dutch as a supported language soon 🙂
Thanks for the good work.
Frits
Hi, Frits, thank you for your kind words and feedback! Please note that translating from other languages into English is currently not supported so this is why you’re seeing the issue with line breaks for each sentence. I will however, raise this issue with our developers nonetheless. Yes, we also want to enable more languages but need to make sure everything works correctly before we do so. We’ll update everyone as soon as this happens.
Thanks for the quick response, Dario,
The problem with hard returns after each sentence also persists when translating from Englis to Italian and English to Spanish.
Best
Frits
Oh, I see! Thanks for clarifying this Frits, I am reporting it to the developers!
Hi again, Frits. We identified this issue and prepared a fix for it. It is currently under review and should be rolling out to the Advanced Translation Editor soon (I don’t have an ETA at this moment). Thanks for reporting it!
Will it be possible to import a set of terms that should always not be translated or translated in a special way, like product names or scientifc or technical terms?
Hi! So, just to make sure, WPML already allows you to manually add terms to your glossary and make sure they are either not translated or translated exactly as you want them to be. We do also have a plan to allow glossary terms to be imported but it is not ready yet and I don’t know when it will be implemented. But it’s definitely on our to-do list and yes, it will be possible.
Hi,
First I was happy but after reading this:
“It is currently not possible to translate from other languages to English. We are aware this is highly-requested and are already working on making this possible.
We’re also already working on adding more language pairs.”, not happy at all.
You just deliver not even a half product. :-((
Hi, Han! What I wrote in the post is literally what is going on – we are working right now on enabling this as soon as possible. And when we say “soon” we really mean it. This is also why we went live with the “beta” in the name. We want to start small and expand this feature as we go. This approach allows us to provide you with the best translations in WordPress (and websites in general) and makes sure everything is tested and ready for production sites. Thank you for the interest and stay tuned, we’ll be announcing more soon. 🙂
If we have our own Pro account for ChatGPT or Claud or Grok, can we use the API to do the translation without topping up credit on WPML? Right now I am already doing this manually, so would be nice if it can do it automatically using my own AI subscription API.
No, this is not possible because that’s not the point of WPML AI. It’s not just about sending your content to a Large Language Model (LLM) like ChatGPT or Claude and then getting and pasting the translations into your site. We apply complex language checks on your content before even sending it to the LLM and we then do another batch when we get the response. And this technology layer on top is what truly makes translations top of the class.
I’m fairly disappointed that this is the only route being taken for ChatGPT / OpenAI integration, we have the possibility of a much cheaper and much more accurate translation model where we can connect our own API, yet we aren’t being offered the product, only the more expensive pseudo variant.
While I think your idea of making the advanced version is a great idea for those with a large budget, you really should consider those of us on a budget who also need higher quality translations at a lower price using the OpenAI API.
I’m sorry you feel this way. However, if you need a cheaper model, you can use the DeepL engine, it’s only 2 credits and its translations are very good. I will share your comment with the team but I can openly tell you that there is currently no plan of adding custom API keys for any of the supported translation engines (we occasionally get this question for DeepL and Google Translate as well).
I cannot find the AI integration or the tool tab following these instructions : “WPML → Translation Management, click the Tools tab and then expand the Automatic translation engines section.”
Is it available worldwide?
Hi, Kris! Yes, this feature is now available to all WPML clients. If you cannot see the “Tools” tab in WPML > Translation Management, your site most probably doesn’t have the Advanced Translation Editor enabled. Please go to the WPML > Settings page and scroll to the Translation Editor section. There, set to use the Advanced Translation Editor. If this doesn’t help or your site already uses the Advanced Translation Editor, please create a ticket in our Support Forum and our supporters will help you investigate and fix this.
When will the AI translation be available from Italian to English?
Hi, Mike! We are planning to enable more language pairs in the coming days, probably next week. I think Italian>English will be in this next batch. I’ll update you here once it’s live. 🙂
Thanks!
Last thing… to understand how I must calculate the costs, I double what I currently pay translating with DeepL?
Example, now with DeepL your simulator shows me the cost € 67 to translate 60000 words (120000 credits) into an additional language, with AI the cost will be € 134?
Do you confirm?
Yes, that is correct and that would be the cost in this particular case. We are working on updating the calculator to include WPML AI as well. It should be ready any time now.
Does this new method rewrite the actual article rather than just rewording paragraphs?
I’m finding when I send my auto-translations via DeepL for verification the translators are saying it’s readable and able to be understood but still very low quality, they suggested the article should be rewritten in German rather than just translated from English.
Hi, Roy! I wouldn’t call it a “rewrite” but WPML AI translates content much more in the nature of the language it is translating to. And it’s not as literal as the other engines like DeepL and Google can sometimes be. For example, if there’s a phrase in the default language that’s very specific to a given language (e.g. “it’s raining cats and dogs”), WPML AI is better at translating such content so it’s not a literal translation but still keeps the intended meaning. If you give WPML AI a go, we’d love to hear how it compares to DeepL.
I’ve switched to using the WPML AI as the only method of translation and requested a translation of one page, it says in the top “Engine used for automatic translation: LLM”, is this the WPML AI doing the translating now?
Hi, Roy! Yes, exactly, this means that the translation you’re looking at was done using WPML AI. Thank you for mentioning this because it should say “WPML AI” and not “Llm”. 🙂 I just raised this to the attention of our developers and it should be fixed soon so that it’s clear which engine you’re using.
Hi,
That’s a nice feature. Is there a way to compare translations with it? I have plenty of translations done with DeepL and I would like to see if they are any better with WPML AI.
Also, can I force a re-translation of an existing content?
Hi, Baptiste! The easiest would be to duplicate some of your pages that you translated using DeepL and translate them using WPML AI. Then you can compare the translations side-by-side.
Yes, you can always re-translate any content that is already translated. First, make sure WPML AI is the primary translation engine. Then, in the Translation Management Dashboard, select the page(s) you want to retranslate. WPML will warn you that the content is already translated and ask what you want to do. Select to “Overwrite existing translations” and that’s it.
Thanks, that’s great!
I gave it a try. On the one hand, the translations are better than DeepL and more fluent.
On the other hand, there are some glitches. For instance, some HTML got translated into that:
Dans l’ensemble, sont excellents>. Vous paierez entre 0,10 % et 0,75 % pour votre portefeuille, et c’est à vous de choisir le portefeuille.
So, there is a useless HTML element and the end of the > is visible for my readers and I lose the strong.
So, not ready for production for my readers.
Hi, Baptiste! Thank you very much for reporting this issue and allow me to clarify. The bug here is the issue with the weird placement of the “>” character in the translated text. Our developers are already investigating why this happened and are working on a fix already. Markup checks are a crucial part of our own algorithms in WPML AI, to make sure HTML tags are correctly retained and applied to translations.
However, the fact that the strong/bold tag was removed from the translation is not actually a bug, it’s the way LLM translation works. As you noticed it uses more natural language when translating content, so sometimes, it concludes that it’s not natural for a word that is bolded or emphasized in English (default language) to be bolded when translated. And we all know this, sometimes, a single word needs multiple words to be translated correctly. And emphasizing it in one language doesn’t work the same in another language.
Hi
When will the WPML AI be available from Slovak to English, German, Polish, Hungarian and other languages?
Hi, Marek! I’m sorry but I don’t know about these particular language pairs at the moment. The testing is ongoing and the first next language pairs will be from the reverse from what we currently have. This means from Spanish, German, Italian, French, and Portuguese to English. I will update you here as soon as I have information about next language pairs!
SPRAŠUJEM ČE JE MOŽNO UPORABLJATI WPML A1 NA SVOJEM RAČUNALNIKU ZA TEKOČE DNEVNE PREVODE?
KOLIKO STANE IN KAKO OPRAVIM NAKUP?
LP HERMAN
Hi, Herman, thank you for an interesting question on whether you can use WPML AI on your computer for everyday purposes. Unfortunately, this is not possible with WPML because it’s first and foremost a tool for translating WordPress sites. If you need a general tool, you could simply use ChatGPT from your browser. I used it in your language (Slovenian) and it works great. Alternatively, you can look into DeepL’s apps which run on every platform including Windows and Macs.
DARIO ZDRAVO.
ZELO SE TI ZAHVALJUJEM ZA ODGOVOR IN PREDLOG ZA OBE MOŽNOSTI,
LEPO BODI IN PAZI NASE
LP HERMAN
I am glad I could help Herman!
Hi! Do you have any updates on the DE>EN translation?
Hi Roman! We found some issues during testing the translation from other languages to English and developers are working on a fix. I’m waiting to hear back from them soon when we’re ready to release these language pairs. I will update you here as soon as it goes live. Thank you!
Great new feature the AI Automatic Translation 🤗
Where could we check the availability of the pair translations? I need Spanish to English!
Thanks a lot!
Hi, thank you! We’re in the middle of final testing for language pairs to translate other languages to English, so it is not yet available. We will add such language pairs really soon and as soon as it goes live, I will update you here with a comment so you can start using it.
Hi Dario, dropping a comment here so I can also get this notification:) I’ve completely overhauled our web design and content so the new translation pairs would come in very handy now. Back in the old days, I had to use WPML + spreadsheet and hire freelance translators. Now planning to use the AI pairs and proofread by a translator.
For reference, we need translation from English to the following: German, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Spanish (ideally Mexican Spanish).
A separate question: which core AI model are you using on the back-end?
Hi, Daniel, thanks for the comment. Of course, I’ll let you know about new language pairs when they arrive! Yes, getting a review of translations done by a translator is nice, especially if you’re in a specific niche that has some specific technical language (e.g. lawyer site, medical site, etc.).
About your question… Just before WPML AI engine went live, we switched to it to test it. So, for the most popular languages, we use WPML AI. However, as it doesn’t (yet) cover all our language pairs, next in our Settings is DeepL and then Google Translate.
We are using WPML since years, and the only thing we are waiting for is to let use OPENAI own accounts, and bypass all the WPML ways
We are translating sensible websites and we cannot share data. That’s a shame you force users to use “credits” and simply not let us use our own keys and bypass WPML cloud services.
Hi, Bertrand. Let me explain why we simply cannot allow people to use their own OpenAI API keys. This would mean that all WPML does is, take your website content, send it to OpenAI, let it translate it however it sees fit, and then take it back as it is and put it back in your site. Correct? Well, that’s the problem – that would certainly break your site because OpenAI would sometimes ruin your HTML and other markup. As you probably know, on a WordPress site, content is actually mixed up with various HTML tags, shortcodes, even JavaScript sometimes. And if you send it to translation unfiltered, it breaks:
– Imagine having content inside a DIV tag with a class “sidebar-left” and then you get it literally translated to Spanish from ChatGPT like as a class “barra-lateral-izquierda”.
So, your site in Spanish is now broken because there are no CSS classes in your site called “barra-lateral-izquierda”. This is just a simple example but there are thousands of ways that unfiltered HTML from a WordPress site would be broken by machine translations.
Again, this is why WPML does so much more with the content – it filters out all markup (HTML, JS, shortcodes, etc.) and then translates only the contents, and then puts it all back together before returning it into your site translated. This is a highly complex process without which sites would simply break. And of course, running such complex operations on content requires us to run powerful servers and it’s using our own, proprietary code – all of which are expensive to develop and maintain, so it’s simply impossible to offer them for free.
Last but not least, when you send anything to OpenAI (and other LLMs) sometimes, you simply get back a question instead of an answer or translation. This too would make your direct OpenAI translations unusable.
Thank you for the question. I updated this post with a section explaining this because I see I need to explain this more thoroughly so that everyone understands why what you’re asking for is simply not possible.
Wow, sounds promising.
I need to try this!
Thanks, Marius! Yes, please try it out and let us know how it goes! 🙂
When you will add new language pairs? I’m particularly interested in Spanish > English
Hi, Juanjo! Yes, we are aware that translating from other languages into English is a much requested feature so we’re working really hard on providing this feature. That being said, the code for this is actually ready and we’re now in the testing phase. As I wrote in this post, we always do a very deep testing for all features and we must be sure everything is working as expected. So, if no big issues are found, it could be ready in the coming weeks, but if by any chance we encounter any big issues, it could be longer. Again, we know this is important and we’re prioritizing it.
Dear Dario
Do you have any road map on when or in which order you plan to release new language pairs? We do have some bigger projects in the pipeline where we are interested in
DE > EN
DE > FR
DE > IT
looking forward to hearing from you!
Hi! I cannot give you a definite answer, but if all goes well, I think the ones you’re asking about could happen in the coming weeks (i.e. September). But again, this is just my own estimate at this time, it’s not an official ETA.
Does or will WPML offer a Latin American or Mexican Spanish instead of the Spain Spanish?
Hi, Yvonne! At this point, only Spain Spanish is supported. We might add other variants of Spanish in the future but we cannot really say when. We have a ton of other world languages to add first before looking into specific language variants.
Is it possible to receive a notification when Dutch is added?
Hi, Nelson! There isn’t a specific email list reserved only for those interested in Dutch translation via WPML AI. But for sure, once we add more languages we’ll send out a newsletter about it.
The translations are great, but 4 translation credits is a lot! 3 credits would be tolerable.
Hi Dmitry! The price in credits was determined by many factors, from the OpenAI API price to the cost of our own technology running on top of it. In other words, it’s not random and it reflects the difference between general costs involved with getting to such a high-quality results. We (and many people switching to it right now) believe it’s more than worth the price.
its possible to connect my own API to it?
Hi, Michal! It is not possible to connect your own OpenAI API key to WPML AI translation engine because we’re not only sending and receiving content but also applying our own language enhancements on top of it. OpenAI API is great for translations but with our own tech on top of it, it’s even better.
Why is it so expensive? I am currently using the free version of GPT Chat and it helps with translations very well, and you are asking for as much as 4 credits. It would be better if you lowered the price to 1 credit, then you would take the request turnover and it would bring more profit.
Hi, Volodymyr! As I explained in the post, WPML is not simply sending content to OpenAI API and retrieving its translations. We run our own language algorithms before sending the content and then we apply another batch once we receive the translations from OpenAI API. The translations from OpenAI API are great but with our tech on top of it, they truly become state of the art. Of course, all of this required tons of development and it requires powerful servers to run it, plus, we take care of it all for you on-the-fly. This is why the price is higher than DeepL and Google Translate, and higher than simply sending stuff to OpenAI API.
You say that you not only receive data from OpenAI and that I hope it is correct but now I ask why you don’t give us the possibility to only send and receive data from open ai ? Hahaha the people not ask you to create WPML ai they ask integration of OpenAI. This is only stuf to let the people pay more for the same thing and yes I now that you want get money it is ok but you here have take the price and ad x4 it is not the right way. You use the wrong method it is not a good deal 4 token.
Hi, Sascha! I suggest checking out our post about upcoming Better Than Human Translation. WPML AI translation engine is the first of two features that together will enable WPML to translate your site better than humans do – at a fraction of a cost (i.e. 4 credits per word). In other words, we want to go beyond simply connecting you to DeepL or OpenAI, we want to provide a tool that gives you the ultimate translation quality – better than the one you get when you pay 10 times (or more) for human translation.
I am WPML’s Content Manager and my team is using WPML AI on all our production and test sites and all of us (and a ton of clients I’ve talked to, for example, on numerous WordCamps across the world) are just waiting for more language pairs. Then, that’s all we need – it’s that good. I could write a whole post about how time and money consuming it used to be to translate WPML.org. All of that is gone now, and I can spend my time on other things.
That being said, we really appreciate your constructive feedback and I will share all comments with the team and the management.
You didn’t really answer my question, but okay. You mentioned that it’s different from a simple API call, so now I’m asking: what are the differences? What justifies the significant price increase? I think you could provide us with more information, or am I mistaken? Additionally, why not offer the OpenAI API as a second option for experts? Or am I wrong in thinking that could be an option?
Thanks for the follow-up comment Sascha. I didn’t realize you were asking me for details about what our algorithms do on top of OpenAI’s API. Naturally, I cannot go into technical details (as this is our proprietary technology) but a big part of it stems from the fact that all languages are different and one way of saying something in English, for example, will simply sound awkward or just wrong in, for example, Spanish. And then, there are hundreds of language-specific details like capitalizing words or making a difference between names and proper nouns. In other words, we are checking and applying a ton of linguistic rules for each supported language. Besides this, you know that ChatGPT is prone to simply making stuff up when it’s not sure about the “correct” answer. Well, it can do the same when translating content and this is also something our engine looks out for.
When I said I will share all comments with the team, yes, I also meant your suggestion about simply providing OpenAI API as a simple translation engine. If we decide to do it, we will announce it just like other engines.
Just a few thoughts about AI.
My thoughts in general are two-fold. On the one hand I understand that AI can be a very great help to assist us doing things that else take a lot of time. And it’s kind of unavoidable in the years to come, so we better learn to use it the right way.
On the other hand I have my doubts about AI, especially when it comes down to creative processes. Writing texts from scratch, like I do almost daily, is very intuitive and while translating texts into German with a befriended and like-minded woman who understands exactly what I try to express, I’ve noticed that texts, when auto-translation (including AI routines) is involved it can do a great job, but usually misses the point, yet the text looks very good. But the essence of what I try to write is lost. And usually only by reading the text out loud and talking it over with someone else the flaws become visible/audible.
This is because AI makes use of what’s already there on the internet. For business-like texts and other none-creative information one can use AI, saving lots of time. But… over the years all these texts begin to read hollow, impersonal, empty, more of the same.
When creativity comes into play then AI is to be used wisely and always to be checked thoroughly. It doesn’t create by itself, although it seems to do so. By letting AI take more and more out of our hands, the danger is that ‘we’ lose creativity, making us poorer.
Best be aware of this, when making use of it.
Hi, Wim, thanks for sharing your insightful thoughts. From my experience, translating more creative content is more challenging for both humans and AI. We sometimes had to resend and correct texts translated by humans, multiple times. So, it’s just comes down to the complexity of the source text. However, in our testing, we found that our new WPML AI engine performs really well in such challenging and creative context as well. Additionally, we believe that together with Maiya, our upcoming AI translation assistant, the translations will match or outperform human translators. This is why it would be amazing to hear your feedback about how WPML AI and Maiya together perform with your content (once we release Maiya, which should be soon). It is possible you’ll still prefer working with a human, and that’s perfectly fine, we know there will always be cases and niches where that will be the preferred option. However, there is also a fair chance that you might be (pleasantly) surprised by the quality of WPML’s AI translations. If you try it out, please let us know (examples would be awesome).
Hi, this is a great development at exactly a great moment for our online magazine.
We are testing and the first thing I noticed is that when translating from English to Italian and to Spanish and from Spanish to English, every translated sentence is followed by a hard return.
See here the original in Spanish
https://magazine.wideoyster.com/es/jordania-oriental-2/
and here the translated result:
https://magazine.wideoyster.com/en/east-jordan/
When translating English to German there are no hard return problems.
Would be great if that can be fixed…
Oh and please add Dutch as a supported language soon 🙂
Thanks for the good work.
Frits
Hi, Frits, thank you for your kind words and feedback! Please note that translating from other languages into English is currently not supported so this is why you’re seeing the issue with line breaks for each sentence. I will however, raise this issue with our developers nonetheless. Yes, we also want to enable more languages but need to make sure everything works correctly before we do so. We’ll update everyone as soon as this happens.
Thanks for the quick response, Dario,
The problem with hard returns after each sentence also persists when translating from Englis to Italian and English to Spanish.
Best
Frits
Oh, I see! Thanks for clarifying this Frits, I am reporting it to the developers!
Hi again, Frits. We identified this issue and prepared a fix for it. It is currently under review and should be rolling out to the Advanced Translation Editor soon (I don’t have an ETA at this moment). Thanks for reporting it!
Will it be possible to import a set of terms that should always not be translated or translated in a special way, like product names or scientifc or technical terms?
Hi! So, just to make sure, WPML already allows you to manually add terms to your glossary and make sure they are either not translated or translated exactly as you want them to be. We do also have a plan to allow glossary terms to be imported but it is not ready yet and I don’t know when it will be implemented. But it’s definitely on our to-do list and yes, it will be possible.
Hi,
First I was happy but after reading this:
“It is currently not possible to translate from other languages to English. We are aware this is highly-requested and are already working on making this possible.
We’re also already working on adding more language pairs.”, not happy at all.
You just deliver not even a half product. :-((
Hi, Han! What I wrote in the post is literally what is going on – we are working right now on enabling this as soon as possible. And when we say “soon” we really mean it. This is also why we went live with the “beta” in the name. We want to start small and expand this feature as we go. This approach allows us to provide you with the best translations in WordPress (and websites in general) and makes sure everything is tested and ready for production sites. Thank you for the interest and stay tuned, we’ll be announcing more soon. 🙂
If we have our own Pro account for ChatGPT or Claud or Grok, can we use the API to do the translation without topping up credit on WPML? Right now I am already doing this manually, so would be nice if it can do it automatically using my own AI subscription API.
No, this is not possible because that’s not the point of WPML AI. It’s not just about sending your content to a Large Language Model (LLM) like ChatGPT or Claude and then getting and pasting the translations into your site. We apply complex language checks on your content before even sending it to the LLM and we then do another batch when we get the response. And this technology layer on top is what truly makes translations top of the class.
I’m fairly disappointed that this is the only route being taken for ChatGPT / OpenAI integration, we have the possibility of a much cheaper and much more accurate translation model where we can connect our own API, yet we aren’t being offered the product, only the more expensive pseudo variant.
While I think your idea of making the advanced version is a great idea for those with a large budget, you really should consider those of us on a budget who also need higher quality translations at a lower price using the OpenAI API.
I’m sorry you feel this way. However, if you need a cheaper model, you can use the DeepL engine, it’s only 2 credits and its translations are very good. I will share your comment with the team but I can openly tell you that there is currently no plan of adding custom API keys for any of the supported translation engines (we occasionally get this question for DeepL and Google Translate as well).
I cannot find the AI integration or the tool tab following these instructions : “WPML → Translation Management, click the Tools tab and then expand the Automatic translation engines section.”
Is it available worldwide?
Hi, Kris! Yes, this feature is now available to all WPML clients. If you cannot see the “Tools” tab in WPML > Translation Management, your site most probably doesn’t have the Advanced Translation Editor enabled. Please go to the WPML > Settings page and scroll to the Translation Editor section. There, set to use the Advanced Translation Editor. If this doesn’t help or your site already uses the Advanced Translation Editor, please create a ticket in our Support Forum and our supporters will help you investigate and fix this.
When will the AI translation be available from Italian to English?
Hi, Mike! We are planning to enable more language pairs in the coming days, probably next week. I think Italian>English will be in this next batch. I’ll update you here once it’s live. 🙂
Thanks!
Last thing… to understand how I must calculate the costs, I double what I currently pay translating with DeepL?
Example, now with DeepL your simulator shows me the cost € 67 to translate 60000 words (120000 credits) into an additional language, with AI the cost will be € 134?
Do you confirm?
Yes, that is correct and that would be the cost in this particular case. We are working on updating the calculator to include WPML AI as well. It should be ready any time now.
Does this new method rewrite the actual article rather than just rewording paragraphs?
I’m finding when I send my auto-translations via DeepL for verification the translators are saying it’s readable and able to be understood but still very low quality, they suggested the article should be rewritten in German rather than just translated from English.
Hi, Roy! I wouldn’t call it a “rewrite” but WPML AI translates content much more in the nature of the language it is translating to. And it’s not as literal as the other engines like DeepL and Google can sometimes be. For example, if there’s a phrase in the default language that’s very specific to a given language (e.g. “it’s raining cats and dogs”), WPML AI is better at translating such content so it’s not a literal translation but still keeps the intended meaning. If you give WPML AI a go, we’d love to hear how it compares to DeepL.
I’ve switched to using the WPML AI as the only method of translation and requested a translation of one page, it says in the top “Engine used for automatic translation: LLM”, is this the WPML AI doing the translating now?
Hi, Roy! Yes, exactly, this means that the translation you’re looking at was done using WPML AI. Thank you for mentioning this because it should say “WPML AI” and not “Llm”. 🙂 I just raised this to the attention of our developers and it should be fixed soon so that it’s clear which engine you’re using.
Hi,
That’s a nice feature. Is there a way to compare translations with it? I have plenty of translations done with DeepL and I would like to see if they are any better with WPML AI.
Also, can I force a re-translation of an existing content?
Hi, Baptiste! The easiest would be to duplicate some of your pages that you translated using DeepL and translate them using WPML AI. Then you can compare the translations side-by-side.
Yes, you can always re-translate any content that is already translated. First, make sure WPML AI is the primary translation engine. Then, in the Translation Management Dashboard, select the page(s) you want to retranslate. WPML will warn you that the content is already translated and ask what you want to do. Select to “Overwrite existing translations” and that’s it.
Thanks, that’s great!
I gave it a try. On the one hand, the translations are better than DeepL and more fluent.
On the other hand, there are some glitches. For instance, some HTML got translated into that:
Dans l’ensemble, sont excellents>. Vous paierez entre 0,10 % et 0,75 % pour votre portefeuille, et c’est à vous de choisir le portefeuille.So, there is a useless HTML element and the end of the > is visible for my readers and I lose the strong.
So, not ready for production for my readers.
Hi, Baptiste! Thank you very much for reporting this issue and allow me to clarify. The bug here is the issue with the weird placement of the “>” character in the translated text. Our developers are already investigating why this happened and are working on a fix already. Markup checks are a crucial part of our own algorithms in WPML AI, to make sure HTML tags are correctly retained and applied to translations.
However, the fact that the strong/bold tag was removed from the translation is not actually a bug, it’s the way LLM translation works. As you noticed it uses more natural language when translating content, so sometimes, it concludes that it’s not natural for a word that is bolded or emphasized in English (default language) to be bolded when translated. And we all know this, sometimes, a single word needs multiple words to be translated correctly. And emphasizing it in one language doesn’t work the same in another language.
Hi
When will the WPML AI be available from Slovak to English, German, Polish, Hungarian and other languages?
Hi, Marek! I’m sorry but I don’t know about these particular language pairs at the moment. The testing is ongoing and the first next language pairs will be from the reverse from what we currently have. This means from Spanish, German, Italian, French, and Portuguese to English. I will update you here as soon as I have information about next language pairs!
SPRAŠUJEM ČE JE MOŽNO UPORABLJATI WPML A1 NA SVOJEM RAČUNALNIKU ZA TEKOČE DNEVNE PREVODE?
KOLIKO STANE IN KAKO OPRAVIM NAKUP?
LP HERMAN
Hi, Herman, thank you for an interesting question on whether you can use WPML AI on your computer for everyday purposes. Unfortunately, this is not possible with WPML because it’s first and foremost a tool for translating WordPress sites. If you need a general tool, you could simply use ChatGPT from your browser. I used it in your language (Slovenian) and it works great. Alternatively, you can look into DeepL’s apps which run on every platform including Windows and Macs.
DARIO ZDRAVO.
ZELO SE TI ZAHVALJUJEM ZA ODGOVOR IN PREDLOG ZA OBE MOŽNOSTI,
LEPO BODI IN PAZI NASE
LP HERMAN
I am glad I could help Herman!
Hi! Do you have any updates on the DE>EN translation?
Hi Roman! We found some issues during testing the translation from other languages to English and developers are working on a fix. I’m waiting to hear back from them soon when we’re ready to release these language pairs. I will update you here as soon as it goes live. Thank you!
Great new feature the AI Automatic Translation 🤗
Where could we check the availability of the pair translations? I need Spanish to English!
Thanks a lot!
Hi, thank you! We’re in the middle of final testing for language pairs to translate other languages to English, so it is not yet available. We will add such language pairs really soon and as soon as it goes live, I will update you here with a comment so you can start using it.
Hi Dario, dropping a comment here so I can also get this notification:) I’ve completely overhauled our web design and content so the new translation pairs would come in very handy now. Back in the old days, I had to use WPML + spreadsheet and hire freelance translators. Now planning to use the AI pairs and proofread by a translator.
For reference, we need translation from English to the following: German, Romanian, Bulgarian, and Spanish (ideally Mexican Spanish).
A separate question: which core AI model are you using on the back-end?
Hi, Daniel, thanks for the comment. Of course, I’ll let you know about new language pairs when they arrive! Yes, getting a review of translations done by a translator is nice, especially if you’re in a specific niche that has some specific technical language (e.g. lawyer site, medical site, etc.).
About your question… Just before WPML AI engine went live, we switched to it to test it. So, for the most popular languages, we use WPML AI. However, as it doesn’t (yet) cover all our language pairs, next in our Settings is DeepL and then Google Translate.
We are using WPML since years, and the only thing we are waiting for is to let use OPENAI own accounts, and bypass all the WPML ways
We are translating sensible websites and we cannot share data. That’s a shame you force users to use “credits” and simply not let us use our own keys and bypass WPML cloud services.
Hi, Bertrand. Let me explain why we simply cannot allow people to use their own OpenAI API keys. This would mean that all WPML does is, take your website content, send it to OpenAI, let it translate it however it sees fit, and then take it back as it is and put it back in your site. Correct? Well, that’s the problem – that would certainly break your site because OpenAI would sometimes ruin your HTML and other markup. As you probably know, on a WordPress site, content is actually mixed up with various HTML tags, shortcodes, even JavaScript sometimes. And if you send it to translation unfiltered, it breaks:
– Imagine having content inside a DIV tag with a class “sidebar-left” and then you get it literally translated to Spanish from ChatGPT like as a class “barra-lateral-izquierda”.
So, your site in Spanish is now broken because there are no CSS classes in your site called “barra-lateral-izquierda”. This is just a simple example but there are thousands of ways that unfiltered HTML from a WordPress site would be broken by machine translations.
Again, this is why WPML does so much more with the content – it filters out all markup (HTML, JS, shortcodes, etc.) and then translates only the contents, and then puts it all back together before returning it into your site translated. This is a highly complex process without which sites would simply break. And of course, running such complex operations on content requires us to run powerful servers and it’s using our own, proprietary code – all of which are expensive to develop and maintain, so it’s simply impossible to offer them for free.
Last but not least, when you send anything to OpenAI (and other LLMs) sometimes, you simply get back a question instead of an answer or translation. This too would make your direct OpenAI translations unusable.
Thank you for the question. I updated this post with a section explaining this because I see I need to explain this more thoroughly so that everyone understands why what you’re asking for is simply not possible.