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Automatic Translation for WordPress Content with WPML

WPML’s Automatic Translation lets you translate WordPress sites accurately, quickly and practically for free. Translate automatically the entire site or only parts that you choose.

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.

Choosing Who Can Use Automatic Translation

By default, WPML enables all users with the Administrator role and those assigned as Translators to use automatic translation for translating your site’s content. However, you may want to limit access to this feature. For example, to prevent situations where users might accidentally use up translation credits by accepting automatically generated translations in the Advanced Translation Editor.

To manage who can use automatic translation:

  1. Go to WPML → Translation Management and click on the Tools tab.
  2. In this tab, find and expand the Who can use automatic translation? section. Here, you will see a list of users. You can disable the automatic translation feature for specific users by unchecking the option next to their names. 

Please note that you cannot restrict access to automatic translation for other users with the Administrator role.

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.

Enabling Translate Everything Automatically mode

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.

Viewing the status of your automatic translations

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 WPMLSettings.

Then, set up any other translators you want on the site.

Choosing who will translate the site

Once the setup is complete, you can send content to be automatically translated using the Translation Management Dashboard.

Translating content automatically from 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.

Automatically translated content in the Advanced Translation Editor

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.

Clicking the lightning bolt icon to automatically translate individual sentences

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 TypeFree credits with purchaseFree credit top-up with renewal
Multilingual CMS90,000Up to 60,000
Agency180,000Up 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 WPMLTranslation Management and click the Tools tab. Then, click the Activate Pay-As-You-Go button.

Setting up pay-as-you-go

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.

Questions? Feedback? Talk with Us!

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