Multilingual Websites
How Do I?
Hello,
I am considering translating one of my websites into several languages and I am wondering what is the best way to go about that. I’m using the latest version of EE and so far in the forums there are only options from many years ago and I’m looking for some fresh insights.
Most of the pages are static and I’m not using channels to output them. And frankly I’m not even sure I’m gonna keep the same website structure or pages yet. I might just start of with translating just a few main pages and leave it at that for a while and I do want them on the same domain, using a url structure like this:
www.domain.com www.domain.com/es www.domain.com/fr etc.
I tried nesting a template group inside of a template group, but that didn’t work. Documentation doesn’t say anything on the matter, and the add-ons are based on using data stored in the db to populate the templates and I don’t want to mess with a bunch of channels just to set all that up. Seems to me there should be a simpler solution. Greatly appreciate any help!
Thanks, Viktor
Hi Viktor
JCOGS Auto-Translate is an add-on that might help.
It allows you to translate any arbitary output from EE to multiple languages, supports the use of the kind of URL based naming you describe, and is easy to install / configure.
The add-on is a front-end for the “DeepL” machine translation service (which is probably/possibly the best one there is currently) - you’ll need an API key from there for the add-on to work, but they offer a “free” key that gives you a limited volume of translation each month which is handy for proving to yourself that it works etc. The paid schemes charge ‘per character’ but are not hugely expensive.
You have the option of either translating identified parts of the template outputs, or “the whole page”.
The translated output is cached so you only need to translate the page content once - saving on translation fees.
If you wait a few days (or contact me directly via EE Slack perhaps for a pre-release copy) a significantly updated version of Auto-Translate is about to be released - the new version has much better approach to talking with the machine translation service (sending fewer characters for the same amount of text translated), greatly improved caching, and support for the “MS Azure AI Translator” machine translation service - which offers many more languages (185 vs. 31 for DeepL) - costs about the same, but provides (according to multiple reviews) less good translations: but it is a good option if you want a translation into something obscure (e.g. Klingon, Traditional Mongolian etc).
HTH
Publisher and Transcribe are two other options.
https://expressionengine.com/add-ons/publisher
https://eeharbor.com/transcribe
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