Multilingual L10n of WordPress Websites: Automated, Unified and Lean

As developers already know, WordPress is the world’s most popular online content management system thanks to its stability, intuitive interface and modularity. An extremely wide range of available plugins enables a high degree of customization of the CMS in accordance with the user’s requirements. One of these plugins – WPML – has been designed to help the website developers and language professionals optimize their cooperation on localization projects.

WPML enables full integration of cloud-based translation productivity software (also known as computer-assisted translation or CAT solutions, such as those developed by SDL or Memsource) into the CMS, making the localization process smoother, faster and leaner.

The main benefits of performing the L10N through CMS-CAT integration with WPML include:

Code and layout integrity preservation

HTML, CSS, JS and other codes will not get lost in translation, i.e. deleted, corrupted or compromised any other way. The layouts, font, image and video settings will remain intact across the localized versions.

Process optimization

There is no more need to waste time and resources on daunting tasks of preparation, export and import of textual content for localization, regardless of the volume of materials.

Automatic assigning

A website can be localized to more languages simultaneously as the completed content is automatically assigned to linguists working on all required languages.

Updates and editing

One of the most rewarding aspects of this approach to localization is an opportunity to centralize the management of multilingual content, which in turn enables further optimization of the entire process at all stages.

The benefits of CAT solutions (increased productivity, time/cost efficiency due to development and management of translation assets – translation memories and termbases) are integrated into website development process and the linguistic tasks – translation, editing, proofreading and expert review of the localized textual elements are all performed in cloud, enabling easy and centralized implementation of any edits and updates at all times.

In addition, all the parties involved can view the localized elements at any moment and address all potential issues, linguistic, design or development-related.

Going global in real time

Website localization represents a meeting point of information technologies and language solutions, but it took some time until the integration of the two into a unified process in which translation and other linguistic tasks run in line with website development.

Localization is still usually performed once an internationalized website has been fully developed, but this concept can largely be bypassed for WordPress-powered websites with the introduction of integrated cloud solutions that enable translation of strings and localization of the textual elements almost in real time.

The end result of automated localization process is a faster and leaner website development, with less translation-related client’s requests that need to be handled by developers.