WPML makes it easy and affordable to translate your site and keep those translations up to date using automatic translation.
There are two ways to use automatic translation on your site:
- Automatically translate your entire site
- Automatically translate individual pages, posts, and other content
To translate content automatically, please be sure you have enabled the Advanced Translation Editor in WPML → Settings. You also need to either assign automatic translation credits to your site or sign up for pay-as-you-go.
Choosing a Translation Engine
Before choosing an automatic translation engine, we suggest you take a look at the list of supported languages for automatic translation with WPML.
You can choose from the following translation engines to power your automatic translation:
Read more about how to change or disable automatic translation engines.
Translating Your Whole Site Automatically
WPML lets you translate entire sites using a combination of automatic translation and human review. You can use this setting to translate the following types of content:
- Posts
- Pages
- Taxonomy terms assigned to any posts or pages
- WooCommerce Products
- Some content from popular plugins
Your site might also feature custom post types and custom fields. By default, these will not usually be automatically translated. However, you can easily enable automatic translation for any post type, custom field, or taxonomy on the WPML Settings page.
To translate your whole site automatically, choose Translate Everything Automatically in the WPML setup wizard or in WPML → Settings.
With Translate Everything Automatically, you don’t need to send any of your posts and pages to translation. Instead, WPML will translate them in the background any time you publish new content or edit existing content. This means your site will always have up-to-date translations.
You can temporarily pause automatic translation anytime from the Translation Management Dashboard. This can be helpful if you still want to translate your whole site, but you need to finalize your site’s content first. When you unpause it, WPML will ask if you want to translate the content you added or edited in the meantime.
Please note that this feature does not automatically translate the following:
- Unpublished drafts
- Content created in a secondary language
- Pages or posts that were previously translated using a different method. This is so you won’t overwrite existing translations. Instead, please continue to use the same translation method you used originally to translate those pages and posts.
Translating Individual Pages, Posts, and Other Content Automatically
If you don’t need to translate your whole site, you can still use automatic translation for the content you do want to translate. Automatic translation is great for generating quick translations, first drafts, short texts, e-commerce product descriptions, and more.
To translate individual pages, posts, or other content, select Translate What You Choose in the setup wizard or in WPML → Settings.
Then, set up any other translators you want on the site.
Once the setup is complete, you can send content to be automatically translated using the Translation Management Dashboard.
You can also use automatic translation on a page-by-page or sentence-by-sentence basis. By default, when you or one of your site’s translators opens a translation job in the Advanced Translation Editor, you’ll see the entire page content automatically translated for you. You can then review and edit the translations.
If you only want to translate individual sentences automatically, click the Undo translation button to remove the prefilled automatic translations. Then, click the lightning bolt icon next to the specific text you want to automatically translate. This will instantly fill in the translations for that text.
Reviewing Automatic Translations
Automatic translation has come a long way in quality in recent years. However, you may still want to have a human review any translations that were done automatically.
WPML has a directory of qualified reviewers that can help. Or, you can assign reviews to be done by any user of your site, including yourself.
You can choose to:
- Review the translations before publishing (recommended)
- Publish translations and review them later (good for when you’re publishing a lot of content and can’t review in real time)
- Publish translations without reviewing (your translations may have some inaccuracies)
Read more about how to review automatic translations on your site.
Try Automatic Translation for Free
The vast majority of sites can use automatic translation for free!
Multilingual CMS and Agency accounts come with free automatic translation credits included in their WPML.org account. Credits for these (new) accounts top up each time you renew your account and can be assigned to any of your registered sites.
Based on our research, these credits are enough to translate the majority of sites. Here is what’s included:
| Account Type | Free credits with purchase | Free credit top-up with renewal |
|---|---|---|
| Multilingual CMS | 90,000 | Up to 60,000 |
| Agency | 180,000 | Up to 120,000 |
Plus, if you choose to pay-as-you-go, your first 2,000 credits each month are free. To set up pay-as-you-go, go to WPML → Translation Management and click the Tools tab. Then, click the Activate Pay-As-You-Go button.
If you need to translate more content, WPML offers convenient and affordable options to pay for automatic translation. Read more about pricing for automatic translation.
