Introduction
DISCLAIMER: We used the Monterey Jazz Festival’s content as a proof-of-concept to showcase our skills and as such does not represent the festival or its organizers in any way. Additionally, as this project was intended to test Multilanguage’s viability as a WordPress localization plugin, the translations were generated via machine translation and do not reflect the translation abilities of our team.
There are many websites all over the internet. Plenty of them are written in English, but there’s a growing number that desire localization into other languages. WordPress has many solutions for this: plugins such as WPML, qTranslate XT, and Polylang are common tools used in our industry.
My colleagues and I decide that we would like to try out something new and weigh its effectiveness in localization: that’s where Multilanguage by BestWebSoft comes in.
Multilanguage is a plugin that supports over 80 languages and can translate posts, pages, and some additional metadata, and includes a connection with Google Translate. All of these features and more are included in the free version, too, which is great news for any small LSP’s with a tighter budget. That being said, the free version does not allow for PEMT of the Google Translate output, which is unfortunate. Although we would have liked to test this out, we decided that sticking with the free version and seeing what its limitations are being the best choice for us.
The first step was actually building the website, using the Monterey Jazz Festival’s current website as a foundation. Since our client asked us to not recreate their website and instead make it simpler, we made some changes, such as choosing a different color scheme and font for our site, and then moved on to the next step: translation.
Multilanguage had some pros and cons in this area: the translation menu in the page editing screen was incredibly useful and allowed for ease in checking the state of content between different locales; however, the plugin did not copy the content from the source language page into the other pages, which meant that we had extra work in this department. We needed to copy over the content and make sure the formatting was the same as in the source content, as shown below:
Another issue that we had was that the translated content would sometimes overwrite the English content, which would further increase our workload!
Moving on, we used Gravity Forms to create our content forms. Unfortunately, we couldn’t use Multilanguage to localize these forms, but this wasn’t an issue. All we needed to do was duplicate each contact form and change the fields with our translations. After that, we only needed to use the appropriate contact forms on the appropriate language page. This was easy with the editing screen’s language switcher.
Finally, the only thing left to do was add a language switcher to our website. Luckily, Multilanguage comes with a language switcher, and we simply placed it on a sidebar widget.
My Takeaways
After completing the project, I have to say that I would not recommend it for use with any clients that have websites with a high page count or a lot of content. The fact that it lacks integrations with any CAT tools is already a huge strike against it and coupled with the fact that it doesn’t include content on pages for your other languages as a default make it very hard to recommend it to any LSPs or freelancers that work in website localization. As with other similar plugins, there is no bilingual view, which means that the translator would need to have multiple tabs open just to make comparisons. The best case for using this plugin would have to be with clients that have very small websites, requiring localization into only a few languages, with content that is not entirely reliant on heavy formatting. Image heavy webpages might see some benefit from this plugin as well since they would need DTP and re-upload anyway. I would strongly suggest sticking with a plugin that includes integrations, or potentially paying for the premium version of Multilanguage and paying for PEMT instead.