GloriaTranslate: planning a multilingual WordPress website

Start with the pages your audience needs

Decide which markets and visitors you want to reach. Your services, practical information and prospective customers’ questions define a useful starting scope. Stabilise the French pages before adapting them.

An editorial website can keep articles in French while offering its service pages in English. The selection should reflect the content’s value to the intended audience and your capacity to keep it up to date.

Translate the whole journey

A carefully translated service page can still lead to a form that is difficult to use. Menus, buttons, fields and error messages are part of the same job.

• Adapt titles, descriptions and navigation labels.
• Translate forms, instructions and submission confirmations.
• Review useful text within images and their descriptions.
• Make contact information and applicable terms accessible.
• Connect equivalent pages and clearly identify content available in only one language.

Choose a solution that fits the website

The choice of plugins depends on the theme, content, features and update process. A small service website, a catalogue and an editorial publication have different requirements.

Consider the integration work, licence and translation costs, editorial review and maintenance. If you use an external translation service, also examine which content it will receive and how its terms cover that data.

Preserve the meaning and check the details

Assisted translation can provide a first draft. Review then checks the meaning, tone and statements that commit the business. A shared vocabulary keeps service names consistent.

Examples, date formats and commercial expressions may need adapting. The finished text should remain faithful to the actual offer, including its scope and conditions.

Check the pages before opening them to visitors

The final checks cover links, language-specific URLs, metadata and the journey on desktop and mobile. Switching languages should lead to a relevant page.

Plan what happens next: who updates each page, who reviews the translation and how will an outdated version be spotted? Changes to an offer in French need to reach the other languages in which that offer appears.