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One of the things I want to do on some of my blogs is get them translated into other languages. Expanding your audience internationally is a great way to build traffic. But paying a translator can be expensive.

However, if you aren’t worried about perfection, using a translation plugin for your WordPress blogs can be a great idea. The plugins won’t do a perfect job, but they will get the idea across, and bring your message to entirely new audiences.

There are a few plugins available. You may have to experiment to find the one that works best for you. You want something that will make indexable pages.

In my reading, one of the most important things I’ve read about is to control the cache time. If you don’t cache for long enough, your site can get banned for a time from Google’s translation services, resulting in your visitors not being able to see your translated pages. The advice I’ve seen says to cache for at least 10-20 hours. It’s something I’ll have to watch for, I guess.

I haven’t decided yet which plugin to try. However, as I have a few blogs I am thinking that I can try a few and see which results I get. And so I thought I would share some of the ones I’m looking at.

Wordpress Global Translator Plugin

This plugin can translate your blog into English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch. Depending on your preferences, you can use the Google translation engine or Babel Fish. It’s friendly to search engines.

Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro

I’ve never bought a plugin, but this one has the features that makes it worth considering. The license is per site, though, so I would have to be very sure that I loved what it does first. But it looks to be more powerful than the free ones. It includes six months of free support and free lifetime upgrades.

Those are my top two choices. I may try some of the others mentioned on Lorelle’s list as well.

However, I have one major concern with getting into blog translations. Most of the sites I looked at that had posted about using translations did not currently appear to be using them. Why not? I found that very interesting but haven’t figured out the answer, aside from the possible issue with translations being blocked from Google’s translation engine.

Have you ever tried a translation of your website or blog? How did it go? Was it worth the effort?

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