Memografía

Since I had the idea of Memografía I wanted it to be bilingual. While my native language is Spanish, most of what I read and watch is in English, causing my first thoughts about writing something to be in this language even if I have to wrestle with it.

Surprisingly enough, while not supported by default, WordPress has a wide variety of choices when talking about multilingual blogging and in this post I’ve tried to briefly summarize them in four categories: Machine Translation, External Human Translation, Internal Human Translation and, finally, Multilingual Blogging.

1. Machine Translation (aka The Lazy Way)

By machine translation I mean using services like Google Translate, Altavista Babelfish Translation and others to translate your blog automatically after clicking a link.

Advantages

• It’s easy. In most cases the only thing you need to do is to activate the plugin to show the links for the different languages.
• It provides the user multiple languages to choose from, not limited by the author’s knowledge.
• According to this blogger, it can be beneficial for your SEO.
• It translates everything, including your theme.

Disadvantages

• The quality of the translations can go from “bad but understandable” to “eye-burningly awful and offensive to the nature of the human race”.
• It depends on the external translation server.

Related Plugins

• ConveyThis (plugin page and example)
• Indoeuropean Translator Widget (plugin page and example) – This  politically correct plugin uses the native language name instead of a flag
• Global Translator (plugin page and example)

My opinion

It’s a fast way to provide a convenient link to an external translator but I wouldn’t trust anything important on it. Normally seen on blogs with a million different widgets.

2. External Human Translation (aka The Expensive Way)

This method involves getting someone else to translate your content, either a freelance translator or an agency.

Advantages

• Translations made by an expert are obviously much better than machine ones.
• It doesn’t depend on the author.

Disadvantages

• You’ll probably have to pay for it. This may or not be a problem, it depends of how much you want a high quality translation for your content.
• In most cases it involves coordinating yourself with your chosen translator, something that may take time.

Related Plugins

• ICanLocalize Translator and ICanLocalize Comment Translator (example)

My opinion

This is the corporate world solution. If you have a business and need to reach people of different nationalities you probably don’t have enough time for the next method and can’t trust the previous one.

3. Internal Human Translation (aka The “I have lots of time” Way)

If you know more than one language and want to translate the posts yourself, this is the approach you want.

Advantages

• Complete control over the translation of the posts.

Disadvantages

• It’s limited to the quantity of languages you are fluent in.
• Depending of your content, it can get very time-expensive.
• It can get hard to maintain database-wise depending of the plugin.

Related Plugins

• Gengo – Not tested in 2.7
• xLanguage (plugin page and example)
• qTranslate (plugin page and example)

My opinion

If you are learning a language and want to translate, sure, try this. However, it’s a huge time sink. Paraphrasing Stephanie Booth, translating each post raises the “publication barrier” of blogging, it’s no longer as easy as writing and hitting Publish.

4. Multilingual Blogging (aka The Simple Way)

Instead of translating all of your content, post individual entries in different languages. Optionally, provide a summary on the reader’s language.

Advantages

• Complete control over the language of each post.
• You can do it without using any extra plugins.

Disadvantages

• Again, it’s limited to the quantity of languages you are fluent in.
• There’s a risk of losing readers if they can’t understand half the posts of your blog. Adding a summary in the other language may help in bilingual blogs but I’m not sure about the viability of that on multilingual ones.
• You’ll probably need a plugin of the previous method to translate your theme if you want it to be multilingual.

Related Plugins

• Basic Bilingual (plugin page and example) – Makes it very easy to add a summary in another language to your posts. Unfortunately, it has a problem with its associated boxes on the administration screen. It’s impossible to move them and their default position is the bottom of the page, making the plugin unconfortable but not impossible to use.

My opinion

This one is the simplest one. Write in whatever language you want, publish, you’re done. On the other hand, it may have SEO implications and it can get confusing for the reader. It’s perfect for a personal blog but I’m not sure if I would use it on a professional one.

My Approach

I’m currently on the “Multilingual Blogging” camp, writing in both English and Spanish according to the content while providing a summary in the other language to keep everyone happy (or at least, informed).

I chose this after reading Stephanie Booth’s blog and her work on bilingual blogging. If I’m honest with myself, if I had to translate each post I would never post. Ever.

The summaries on this site were based on the ones she has on her blog. I was actually going to use her plugin but the issue I detailed earlier made me reconsider. I ended up replicating its functionality by using Custom Fields Template and a couple of custom queries on the template.

Of course, I’m not the only one who was written on the topic. Here are some related links:

• Translation and Multilingual WordPress Plugins – Lorelle’s take on the topic. As always, very informative, if a little outdated.
• Multilingual WordPress – A very sparce related entry on the Wordpress Codex.
• WP Multilingual – Blog about multilingualism using WP. Very centred on Gengo.
• Climb to the Stars – Stephanie Booth’s blog, who has been blogging bilingually for 9 million internet years (since 2000) and regularly writes on the topic.