Creating a multilingual WordPress site using Hongo Theme with Weglot is super easy and quick!
In this article, we’ll walk you through the simple steps to translate your WordPress site and create a fully multilingual website in just minutes, regardless of the plugins you’ve installed.
Requirements
To get started with Hongo and Weglot, install and activate the following:
Table of Contents
- Configuration and settings
- Editing translation
- Editing metadatas
- Editing media files
Installing Weglot on your WordPress website
Step 1
Go to your WordPress dashboard > ‘Plugins tab’ > ‘Add New’ and search for Weglot.
Click install, then after a few seconds, click the activate button.
You’ll notice that a Weglot tab has appeared in your WordPress dashboard. Simply click on it to put the final touches on your configuration.
Step 2
Enter your unique API key—available on your Weglot Dashboard (you’ll need to create an account to get access to this).
Then select the current language of your site and add the new languages you want to translate it into. Click ‘Save Changes’.
Step 3
It’s done! Go to your website and you’ll see it’s fully translated, using a first layer of machine translation. You’ll notice Weglot has gone ahead and added a language switcher to the bottom right of your website.
You can go to your Weglot tab in your WordPress dashboard and customize your language switcher to match the design of your site.
You can also choose to automatically redirect your visitors by their browser language, you can do so by making sure that “auto-switch” is turned on in your ‘Settings’ tab within the Weglot Dashboard.
Editing your translations
As mentioned, Weglot gives you a first layer of machine translation. You can choose to leave those translations as they are or manually edit them to meet your translation requirements.
Go to your Weglot Dashboard > Projects > Translations > Languages and click into the translation you’d like to edit. Once changed, it’s automatically saved!
You can also use the Weglot ‘Visual Editor’ view which takes you to a live preview of your website to edit your translation.
Simply click on the blue pencil icon next to any of the highlighted text to make a change. A box will then appear and you can make your change, then click OK to save it. This change will instantly appear on your live website.
Editing metadas
Weglot doesn’t just stop at translating the visible text on your website. It goes the extra mile by automatically detecting and translating even the unseen elements, like your metadata, into your chosen target language. To locate these translations, simply filter your translations list by selecting ‘meta’.
Translating media files
In addition to translating the content of your Hongo theme, Weglot also allows you to translate media files, such as images, videos and PDFs to give you a fully localized website.
To translate an image go into your translations list. At the bottom you’ll see ‘Add media translation’.
Once you’ve clicked on it a box will appear asking you to add the original image file URL and the image file you’d like to replace it with. Once you’ve clicked ‘add’ the image file will be added to your translations list and updated on your front website.
The same process can be repeated for any image, video or PDF you’d like to replace across your website.
You can start translating your website today using Weglot’s 10-day free trial to explore the platform and get access to all the features of a paid plan. `
For those with websites under 2,000 words and wanting to add 1 additional language you can continue using Weglot for free. Paid plans start from just €15 a month depending on the number of languages and words on your site.