Implementing automatic translation on Craft CMS can be a game-changer for businesses looking to expand their reach and engage with a global audience. In today’s interconnected world, having a multilingual website is no longer a luxury but a necessity.
Craft CMS is a powerful and flexible content management system that provides a robust platform for building and managing websites. Integrating automatic translation into your Craft CMS site allows you to streamline creating and maintaining multilingual content, saving time and resources while ensuring a consistent and high-quality user experience across multiple languages.
This guide will explore the importance of implementing automatic translation on Craft CMS and walk you through the steps to achieve this seamlessly.
The benefit of implementing automatic translation on Craft CMS
Before discussing further how to implement automatic translation in Craft CMS, you also need to know what benefits you will get if you implement it in Craft CMS. Here are some of them.
- Reach a Global Audience: By providing your website content in multiple languages, you can expand your reach and connect with a broader audience worldwide. For example, if you run an online travel agency that offers services across Europe, automatically translating website content into French, German, Spanish, and Italian can open up new markets and attract customers who may not be fluent in English.
- Improve User Experience: Offering content in a user’s preferred language enhances their overall experience on your website. Users are more likely to engage with and understand content presented in their native language, leading to increased satisfaction, trust, and loyalty toward your brand.
- Increase Conversion Rates: Studies have shown that people are more likely to purchase or take desired actions when presented with content in their native language. One of the benefits of a multilingual website is can boost conversion rates and drive more sales or lead generation.
- Consistent and Up-to-date Content: With automatic translation service, you can ensure that your multilingual content stays consistent and up-to-date across all language versions. Whenever you update the source content, the translations can be automatically generated, eliminating the need for manual updates and reducing the risk of inconsistencies.
- Facilitate SEO and Drive International Traffic: Automatically translating your website content into multiple languages can significantly boost your search engine optimization (SEO) efforts and increase website traffic from international markets.
Example of implementing multilingual website Craft CMS
After knowing the benefits you will get, before getting into how to implement a multilingual website, here we have several examples of multilingual Craft CMS that can be used as inspiration.
Hotz Brand Consultants is a branding and consulting company built using Craft CMS. Their website features a bold and minimalist design with a yellow color scheme and simple graphics. As seen in the top left corner, the site uses a language switcher. Although based in Switzerland, the site offers language-switching services between English and German. Therefore, if global visitors do not speak German, they can switch to English.
With this approach, the website can appear in search results for global users outside of Switzerland, making it easier for international visitors to find the site. This, in turn, can improve SEO rankings and increase web traffic.
Nomura
Nomura is a large global financial services company operating in around 30 countries. Its website serves an international audience through an English version and its domestic market in Japan through Japanese and Chinese translations. This allows it to provide localized content tailored to different linguistic and cultural contexts.
By publishing content on the site in different languages, Nomura can effectively communicate with clients worldwide while maintaining brand consistency across markets. This is an example of a well-executed localization strategy for the online presence of a multinational company.
How to implement automatic translation on Craft CMS
After knowing the multilingual Craft CMS example, here we will start trying to implement automatic translation in Craft CMS using an automatic translation service.
Many translation services can automatically translate the web easily and quickly in just a few configuration steps. Linguise’s automatic translation service is one such service.
This service is integrated with various CMS and web builders, including Craft CMS. To install Linguise automatic translation on Craft CMS, follow these steps.
Step 1: Prepare your Craft CMS
The first step is to ensure your Craft CMS website is ready for translation. Some things you need to prepare for installing Linguise automatic translation on a Craft CMS website include access to the Craft CMS admin dashboard.
Step 2: Register Linguise account
Next, sign up for a free Linguise account to add your website’s domain. You can use the Linguise free trial for 30 days before committing to a subscription plan.
Step 3: Adding domain website Craft CMS
After successfully creating a Linguise account, you will gain access to the dashboard where you can add your Craft CMS website domain. Click “Add domain” and then fill in the following fields:
- Account
- URL
- Platform used (Craft CMS)
- Default language
- Translation languages
- Translate URLs
- Dynamic content translation
Then, click “Next Step”.
You can also get the API key you should paste on the next step.
Step 4: Upload & connect the Linguise script
Then, the Linguise translation script needs to be uploaded to your server where Craft CMS is installed:
Download the PHP-JS translation script. Unzip it and upload it to the root folder of your Craft CMS installation.
Ensure that:
- The script is placed at the root level of your website (where your Craft CMS files are located).
- The folder retains its default name, “linguise”.
Next, copy the Linguise API key into the Configuration.php file you uploaded to your server. Edit the file and paste your API key between the quotes, replacing the text REPLACE_BY_YOUR_TOKEN.
Step 5: Configure the URL rewriting for Craft CMS
By default, URL rewriting is enabled in Craft CMS. If it is not, you can activate it through your hosting provider. Your Craft CMS .htaccess file should look something like this.
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^(af|sq|am|ar|hy|az|eu|be|bn|bs|bg|ca|ceb|ny|zh-cn|zh-tw|co|hr|cs|da|nl|en|eo|et|tl|fi|fr|fy|gl|ka|de|el|gu|ht|ha|haw|iw|hi|hmn|hu|is|ig|id|ga|it|ja|jw|kn|kk|km|ko|ku|ky|lo|la|lv|lt|lb|mk|mg|ms|ml|mt|mi|mr|mn|my|ne|no|ps|fa|pl|pt|pa|ro|ru|sm|gd|sr|st|sn|sd|si|sk|sl|so|es|su|sw|sv|tg|ta|te|th|tr|uk|ur|uz|vi|cy|xh|yi|yo|zu|zz-zz)(?:$|/)(.*)$ linguise/linguise.php?linguise_language=$1&original_url=$2 [L,QSA]
# Send would-be 404 requests to Craft
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(favicon\.ico|apple-touch-icon.*\.png)$ [NC]
RewriteRule (.+) index.php?p=$1 [QSA,L]
</IfModule>
Step 6: Activate & customize the language switcher
The Linguise JS script link must be included on all your Craft CMS pages to show the language switcher with flags and add alternate URLs to your HTML headers for SEO purposes.
To get the script link, go to the domain settings in the Linguise dashboard and copy the provided script link.
A straightforward method to integrate this code into Craft CMS is adding it to your template index. Navigate to the /template folder and modify the index file to include the script link in the header section.
The language switcher, represented by the flag popup to select your preferred language, can be loaded by copying the provided code at the end of the website configuration and pasting it into the head of your HTML page. This will automatically load the flag language switcher.
The language switcher will appear by default, but you can customize it. Customize the language switcher from the Linguise dashboard by navigating to Settings > Language flags display. You can see the following language flags display, consisting of several menus you can customize, starting from the main display, language names, and design.
Step 7: Automatic translation of your Craft CMS
Finally, you can see how it looks after setup the language switcher. Here is an example of what Craft CMS looks like translated automatically using Lingusie’s automatic translation service.
Linguise: Best automatic translation that is integrated with Craft CMS
Now, you can implement automatic translation on your Craft CMS website using Linguise. Linguise can be one of the best options among the many automatic translation services. So what are the advantages of Linguise translation services? Pay attention to the following points.
Linguise integrated with 40+ CMS, one of which is Craft CMS
Linguise supports over 40 types of CMS and web builders, including Craft CMS automatic translation. Its seamless support and integration process makes it the ideal solution for translating your Craft CMS website. In addition, with each integration, Linguise supports more than 80 popular and traditional languages worldwide.
Some popular CMS also supported by Linguise include:
- WordPress automatic translation, for which Linguise offers a plugin to translate WordPress
- Joomla automatic translation component
- Prestashop
- WooCommerce
- OpenCart, and many others
Edit translation with Linguise front-end live editor
Additionally, you can refine Linguise’s automatic translation outputs using the front-end live editor functionality. With this feature, you can easily tweak translations with minimal effort.
Furthermore, you can invite proficient translators in particular languages to collaborate. This ensures that the translated website maintains contextual and cultural accuracy.
Linguise automatic dynamic translation feature
Linguise’s dynamic translation feature seamlessly translates content loaded or generated dynamically on a website, including JavaScript, AJAX, or other client-side scripting techniques. This includes dynamic content like JavaScript-generated content, content that changes based on variables, and tooltips or error messages.
This feature ensures a consistent multilingual experience for visitors without complex configurations or code editing. Simply activate the dynamic translation button on the dashboard to translate dynamic content into all languages.
Linguise automatic translation exclusion rules
Sometimes, words don’t translate well into other languages, so it’s best to keep them as they are or skip them in specific languages. Linguise has a few handy rules to help with this:
- Ignore Text Rules: You can tell Linguise to skip translating specific words or phrases so they stay the same in all languages.
- Ignore Inline: This lets you keep specific formatting consistent across all languages, like links or bold text.
- Exclude Pages using URLs: If you have pages that don’t need translating, you can skip them altogether.
These rules ensure your translations are clear and accurate, especially when dealing with tricky words or essential brand names.
Complete and thorough SEO implementation
Selecting a service that backs multilingual SEO is a crucial decision. This support ensures your site’s visibility on Google search pages, making it easily discoverable by users.
Linguise offers diverse SEO functionalities, including:
- Automated hreflang codes and tags
- Automated canonical URL setup
- Creation of multilingual sitemaps
- Translation of URLs and meta descriptions, and more.
Conclusion
Implementing automatic translation on your Craft CMS website can be a game-changer. It can enable you to reach a global audience, improve user experience, boost conversion rates, and enhance your SEO efforts. By leveraging a powerful solution like Linguise, you can seamlessly integrate multilingual capabilities into your Craft CMS site, ensuring consistent and up-to-date content across multiple languages.
Linguise stands out as the best automatic translation service integrated with Craft CMS. It offers a wide range of features, including front-end live editing, dynamic content translation, translation exclusion rules, and comprehensive SEO implementation.
So what are you waiting for? Register your Linguise account and create your multilingual Craft CMS website to unlock the potential of reaching a global audience and take your business to new heights with the power of automatic translation.
