When you start working on your multilingual website, don't translate all your content into the new language. Start slow and work your way up from there. If you're building a multilingual e-commerce website, don't forget currency exchanges and marketing sensitivities in multiple countries. Native speakers will almost always translate the content of your website better than Google, so using Google Translate on your site is the “good enough solution”.
If you choose a CMS that requires an add-on for multilingual content, you'll need to choose a website translation tool before continuing. This means that you can have a single website domain with linked pages in other languages, or use separate domains to host multilingual versions of your content. In fact, a multilingual website is useless if the user cannot find the button to change the language that he can understand. To be able to adjust these layout problems and ensure a perfect design in all languages, it's useful to have a tool like TranslatePress that offers a visual translation interface where you can preview changes in real time, instead of the background interfaces that many translation tools use.
But can machine translations really offer the same quality as native speakers? Are there other language- or culture-specific changes that your audience would expect on your site? If so, then it makes sense to invest in manual translations and use a tool like WPML. Google Translate can also be added to your website, allowing users to automatically translate your website into the language they want. Milestone helps you to seamlessly translate %26 content and localize your website, products and services in more than 70 languages. As a general rule, when setting up a multilingual website, use Unicode, a platform that can encode characters from more than 90 languages.
This applies to both single-language and multi-language sites, but the stakes are more serious for multilingual sites, as some multilingual solutions can slow down the site by adding additional file size and unnecessary queries to the database. However, when you translate your content into new languages, this spacing can become a problem because the translations don't always take up the same amount of space. Then, once you have that basic site in just one language, you can translate it into as many different languages as you need with the simple visual translation editor you saw above. The biggest mistake about creating a multilingual website is that installing a plugin automatically translates all the content, but that's only partially true.
