Localisation with WordPress
WordPress is one of the most popular content management systems (CMS) worldwide. This platform enables anyone with a working knowledge of IT and web technologies to set up a blog or website. WordPress is free, accessible and user friendly. It is also one of the best platforms for facilitating the localisation of a website and bringing its online contents to more customers and larger audiences. We’ll explain why and how!
WordPress is global…
When you are drawing up an international strategy for your business or online project, there’s an important statistic that you need to bear in mind: only 25.9% of Internet users are native English speakers. In other words, if you want to reach the whole world, you’re going to need a tool that can create a multilingual website simply, quickly and efficiently.
And this is where other statistics and important factors come in:
- Today, around 40% of websites worldwide are thought to use WordPress technology. In other words, many of the websites created with this system can reach audiences all over the world.
- The system is used in 178 countries.
- The platform’s interface is available in 57 languages.
… and it’s flexible!
The system was initially designed for creating blogs, but it has evolved so much that it can now be used to set up any type of website: stores, personal portfolios, official company websites, etc. As it is open source technology , it can be freely altered by programmers to cater to the website’s needs.
But there are still lots of solutions for people who have not mastered the mysteries of code. There are around 50,000 free or commercial plugins, created by the community of users and software companies, adding new functions to the system.
Possibilities
WordPress’s many plugins are just a small part of a localisation process. Most of them make it possible to show contents in different languages, and some can connect to machine translationtechnologies (CAT or computer assisted translation). These automatic translations use basic CAT tools that are normally free, but should always be backed up by at least one human revision. Depending on the purpose of the website, the quality of the translation in question needs to be gradually improved. A CAT tool may be acceptable for a personal blog, but for a company or professional website, translations with localisation should be done by a specialised translation company.
WordPress can also be connected to translation management systems (TMS) that offer e-commerce automation, digital marketing campaigns and access to software and data repositories. There are also SEO functions that are native to the system. When used with CAT technologies, they enable your website to be rapidly available in several languages… and clearly visible in search engines!
It is therefore no surprise that WordPress has become the tool of choice for companies, bloggers, institutions and all kinds of projects.
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