WPML offers automatic translation as one of the many features within the Advanced Translation Editor. This integration includes a number of benefits, however, it also means it is not possible to use your own API key.
The Advanced Translation Editor includes additional features that save you money
We know it can be frustrating to have to pay to translate the same segments. For this reason, the Advanced Translation Editor includes translation memory, which can recognize segments you’ve translated previously and automatically fill in the saved translations. This saves you from needing to retranslate these sentences again or have them count against your monthly word quota.
You can also save preferred translations for specific terms in the Advanced Translation Editor’s glossary. These saved translations are also not counted towards your word quota.
These are valuable features that can save you money and time as you continue adding and editing content on your site. Because an API would simply connect you directly to the translation engine, it would bypass these features.
The Advanced Translation Editor is hosted on WPML’s servers so it doesn’t slow your site
To prevent automatic translation from breaking your site’s content, WPML needs to apply advanced processing on the inputs and outputs. This logic runs on our specialized, fast servers to keep WPML’s code lean and prevent from overloading your own server.
Because we are making the requests from our own server, it would be both impractical and insecure to use individual API keys.
WPML offers affordable automatic translation and is constantly improving
We want to be sure automatic translation is an affordable option for everyone. To do this, your first 2,000 credits are free each month when you sign up for pay-as-you-go. This is enough for most small sites to translate their content completely for free.
For clients with larger sites, our pricing per word goes down as volumes increase.
WPML continues to add new features to make it simple and straightforward to translate and maintain a multilingual site.
Read more about translating your site automatically using DeepL, Google Translate, and Microsoft Azure.
Other options
As you can see, WPML has integrated automatic translation with a number of beneficial features to make translating your site easy, convenient, and unobtrusive to your site’s performance.
However, if you decide you would rather not use automatic translation through WPML, you can export and import your translation jobs manually as XLIFF files.