When it comes to multilanguage blog management, things are getting hard. It’s not your fault, the “multilanguage thing” is complex.
Terminology (not official)
Internationalization should be the ability of a system to deal with many languages and cultures. Natively it supports one or more ways to translate and localize the content it manages.
Localization is the act of creating content for a specific language and culture. It could be some content makes sense in one language or culture and not in another one. Talking about labels the localization is just the translation.
On this page, you can get deeper into those concepts. If you need to play international, you should definitely read it.
A locale is a set of information (texts and so on) the system uses to adapt to a specific language and country (with variants). A locale is identified by a code, made of the language, the country (usually), and a variant. For example, it_IT indicates the Italian language used in Italy. While it_CH identifies the Italian language used in Switzerland. There is a third-level part called variant but I never had the chance to use it on a real product.
WordPress Multilanguage Concepts
WordPress is ready for internationalization and localization: it provides tools to create language packs for more than 60 locales so you can choose to use it with your preferred locale. For example, my customers usually install it with the it_IT locale and WP downloads the related language packs (for itself and the installed plugin).
A WP site has a default locale selected during the installation and you can find it on WP main settings. Once it was hard coded on the site’s wp-config.php file with the constant WPLANG.
Of course, WP knows nothing about the language you use when writing content or defining tags and categories. The blog language is used only to get the correct locale pack and show in that language all the labels coded to be translated.
So if you set the WP language to Italian, you’ll see the admin side and the common label of your public site (for example the “Search” word) translated in Italian (if your theme has the Italian locale).
The language can be set even at the user level. So, when a user logs in and has a different language in his/her profile than the default site language, WP will give priority to the user setting and switch to that locale.
Problems Come With Content
The real internationalization/localization problem starts when you need to translate your content. Not only, but even your categories, tags, or media (yes an image could be translated if contains text or metadata).
There are two main approaches:
- everything you write in your primary language needs to be translated
- what you produce in a language does not necessarily need to be available in another language
With the first approach, you just have one site and you add, over the translations provided by WP, the translations of your content. So, for example, a post is a post and you can read it in English or Italian. A category is a category and you have the name in English and in Italian.
This is the first thing that comes to mind when we think about translating a site. And it is a good, methodic, and easy method. TranslatePress is one of the tools available.
The second approach is more general and it’s like having two sites. You can have posts in English and posts in Italian, completely uncorrelated. This is common for companies that use the “translation” to provide content for different countries and those contents need to be different.
Of course, you can have a post that just needs to be translated: the approach is to create different posts for your language and “link them” so you know that post #12 is the translation of post #17 (and online you can switch between them).
But you can have post #67 just in English and visible only when someone surfs the site selecting the English language without any way to switch to the Italian version of the article (that doesn’t exist).
The tools you can use for this second methodology are WPML and Polylang.
Is There a Best Choice?
No. You need to think carefully about what you need and remember there is not an easy way back.
