Someone emailed me recently to ask about how they should approach the task of setting up a multi-lingual WordPress site (en+fr). My response was long enough that I figured I’d post it here for anyone curious about my thoughts.
We’re looking to update our WordPress website with a multi-language setup […] Would you recommend that we use a multi-lingual plugin, such as WPML, or just create two different wordpress sites? I’d rather do the former, since once setup it demands much less updating. I’ve heard in the past that this is very difficult to do, but now with WP 3.0, I’m thinking it must be much easier. I’d much appreciate your opinion.
Multi-lingual in 3.0
The advent of 3.0 has changed many things but not the frustrating lack of support for multilingualism in WP. The same issues exist now as did in the 2.x days. The main relevant change in 3.0 is that WPMU, a seperate project which let you have multiple sites in one installation, is now part of the main WordPress code. The feature is now referred to as “Multi-site” or “Network” and is fairly easy to activate. This means if you decide to use separate sites it is a bit simpler to have both sites running off the same WP install and sharing themes/plugins. Just set up your main site as mysite.com and the French one as fr.mysite.com.
Plugins can be abandoned
While its true that two sites requires more tedious repetitive work during updates it less likely to involve insane compatibility work that could arise from the plugin acting up or becomming unsupported. Users of the previously-standard Gengo plugin all got fucked around version 2.5 (don’t feel like looking up the exact version) when the plugin stopped working and none of them could update their sites, leaving them susceptible to hackers. An unpatched version of WP is often vulnerable to attack and a site that depends on a plugin that stops working can’t be patched.
WPML.org is probably your best bet for a plugin
WPML seems like it has serious and dedicated professional developers, and has a LOT of features that are very useful, so its a decent bet that as a translation system it will continue working for a long time. Especially if you don’t have a ton of content it is a pretty good choice (because you can always copy/paste the content into a second site some day if the plugin stops working). Using it will require some heavy modifications to your theme if you want the language chooser etc. to actually make sense. My experience with WPML has lead me to believe that the devs aren’t particularly great UI designers compared to their programming skills.
Multiple sites keeps your posts database clean and logical
I personally like the two-site approach because it keeps your content and databases clean as a tradeoff for the deeper linkage between translations you could otherwise get from a plugin. It’s extra hassle to edit the content on both sites all the time but IMHO the bigger hassle is actually translating and keeping content fully synchronized which is nearly impossible regardless of your translation infrastructure.
On Global Voices we have a custom solution we call Lingua
I don’t have any real experience with WPML or qTranslate (the other big name in WP translation) because on Global Voices (the site I run) I’ve coded a custom translation plugin that we call Lingua. It uses separate sites but keeps a database that links translations across the sites (see http://fr.globalvoicesonline.org/2010/09/02/43270/ for an example of the output). IMHO this is the best model for running translations because if the plugin stops working all you lose is the links to other versions. Each translation site can continue to work independently without knowledge of the others, so you can work on the update issues seperately while still being secure. Unfortunately the plugin isn’t even close to being public-friendly, but I’m hoping the model gets used someday. I added it to the list of potential plugin types on the Codex page about multilingual WordPress.
Maybe one day it will be easy
Good luck to anyone trying to build multi-lingual WordPress sites. It’s a nightmare but none of the other CMS options are actually much easier, and all the other benefits of WP make it hard to turn down. Here’s hoping that one day the core development team is willing to pick up the problem and commit to a standardized solution (vote for built-in multilingualism on the WordPress “Ideas forum”).
EDIT (Sep 11, 2010): I should also mention the Worldwide Lexicon project and their WWL translation plugin for WordPress. It has an intense approach that combines machine translation with human editing to make your site quickly translated and let you improve it incrementally as time goes on. I haven’t used their plugin myself because older dev versions I tried were very buggy and hard to understand. If you’re just starting now the new versions are worth a try and may be a good solution if the combination of machine and human translation is desirable to you.
