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One of the things that I didn’t like about WPML was the amount of work, and copy paste that I have to do if I wanted to translate content.
The easiest and cheapest way to translate content with WPML was using Google Translator and copy the text to the translation manager.
That was time consuming and a repetitive work.
Therefore, I went out to try Weglot, a fast and accurate multilingual translation plugin.
But after testing Weglot, I noticed that the plugin could be expensive to maintain for me due to the amount of written content that I have in my blog, and also I wanted to have at least 5 languages.
5 languages multiplied by the number of words that I had in my website, made me reach pretty soon the word limit of the Weglot’s Pro Plan.
I faced myself into the decision, paying more for another Weglot’s plan or go back to WPML.
Paying almost €2000 per year was not an option.
I changed back to WPML and I noticed that WPML was starting to improve their automatic translations.
Couple months after I changed, they announced a big deal for the WordPress Automatic Translations, Deepl arrived to WPML.
Deepl is a german based service that has a pretty accurate translation, better than Google Translator.
For now Deepl has a few number of available languages they could translate.
For WPML automatic translation you have to pay an extra fee depending on the credits that you use.
WPML automatic translation is based on credits and not in the word count, as in Weglot.
Actually, it may sound as word count, but there is a technical difference.
The difference relies that with WPML you can have more control in which content you will spend your credits, and which translation service will you use for it.
For example, Microsoft translation costs 1 credit, Google translations costs 2 credits, and Deepl translations costs 3 credits.
So, you can choose which translation service you want to use and how will you spend it.
In that, WPML has more control than Weglot, nevertheless it is worth mentioning that it is still time consuming, but way much better than in the past.
I wanted to get deeper into the price comparison between Weglot vs WPML, I’ll try to get the exact price of a word, of course if I am not wrong.
In the monthly Weglot Business plan, you pay $23.38 dollar for 50000 words, which is $0.00046 per word.
In the yearly Weglot Business plan which gets cheaper, you pay $233.77 per year, which per month is $19.48 for 50000 words, which is $0.00038 per word.
In a monthly payment for up to 100,000 WPML credits you pay $17, which if you use Deepl 3 Credits, that means it is 33,333 words, which is $0.00051 per word.
As you keep using higher number of credits in WPML, the price gets lower.
Nevertheless in that comparison Weglot shows better price per word.
The big BUT cames when Weglot establishes a Word Limit, and in WPML when you pay again for the credits you have new credits that you can use to translate new content.
Actually there is no word limit in WPML.
And even so, for now I am using free Deepl Windows Plugin to have a faster copy-paste of selected phrases, and combining the automatic translation.
The addition of DeepL to WPML has finally arrived, and it has only served to bring us good news. Want to build a multilingual website, now it’s easier than ever.
Learn why this will be the translation engine that gives you a better machine translation than Google.
If you want to learn more about you can read the Translate Your WordPress Site with DeepL by WPML.org.
We have all heard about WPML, not only as the WordPress plugin that allows us to make our sites multilingual in a very simple way, but it is the best in its area, being the most used in the world.
And, in the case of DeepL, it’s an online translator that may not have become as popular as Google’s yet, but it has a greater capacity to perform automatic translations with an efficiency that would seem like a manual translation by someone who masters the language.
These two are related at the point that it is now possible to use DeepL as the preferred translation engine for WPML machine translation.
Remembering that, recently, Google was also added as a translation engine. And these are facts that seek to improve the machine translation quality of the plugin.
Within the same update of the additions, other features were added, such as viewing translations from other sources within the same advanced translation editor, being able to disable certain specific translation engines, and support for custom language mapping.
We all know that machine translation can be a problem. This is because most translators out there often do not understand the context, the meaning, or the intent of a sentence. Much less will they understand the way you have added your keywords.
This is why one of the most appreciated tips when setting up a multilingual website is that translations are done manually, and by people who are fluent in the language, so that the margin of error is minimal, if any.
What happens with DeepL is that this translator uses artificial intelligence, which makes it capable of offering users high quality natural translations. This means that, while they may not be as accurate as a manual, they are almost as good.
The association of DeepL and WPML is really not a surprise, since, over the years, many users had asked for this to happen and finally, until today, we can see a union that promises to make building a multilingual website even easier.
In the last few months we can see that with the addition of this new translation engine option, they are working on an idea of expansion and improvement in quality, along with a slight change in prices.
This is something that does not affect customers who are satisfied with Microsoft Azure, since it is the translation engine they would have configured before the change, however, we could say that the standards by which these prices are as follow:
We can understand then, that the monthly cost of DeepL and WPML will depend on how many credits are needed. Leaving us a price table as:
These price ranges are only for those websites that are registered with WPML.org with valid accounts. Those who are not will have a surcharge on their monthly payment of $2.98 for automatic translation.
Full list of WPML automatic translation languages:
At this point it is no secret that WPML gives the option to set an order of preference of translation engines. And this is perhaps one of the most useful tools.
Why should you enable a preference order among the existing ones, and not just one? It is that, in some cases, it may happen that the preference engine does not support one of the languages you are working on. What this plugin does, is to consult the second option in order to continue building the web.
However, nowadays it is also possible to deactivate those translation engines that you really do not want to use, and this gives you more control over the costs generated by automatic editing.
These functions can be done very easily, by dragging between the list of translation engines and leaving above the one you prefer. You can add a second option, another one you trust, and you leave the one you hope never to use as a third option.
To turn them off you only have to change the switch that is ON to OFF, in this way, even if your translation engine doesn’t have the word, the plugin won’t consult any other.
You should know that, by default, this WordPress plugin places Google as the translation engine of choice. So you will have to do the process if you create a new account, just as if you have been working with any other account that already existed before the update.
If you want to use DeepL to translate your website, you have several options.
The most straightforward solution is to use the Deepl API directly and integrate it into your website with some specific Deepl WordPress plugins.
This way, you can quickly and easily translate your site with a few configurations
Alternatively, the use of plugins as we mention here like WPML, is one example of a plugin that allows for automatic translation of content using DeepL.
DeepL integration has turned out to be a great solution for websites, even better than Google translate, as you can translate your entire site with more accuracy.
Now that you know each and every detail of the incorporation of DeepL to WPML, we understand that you can’t wait to benefit from this new tool in the construction of your multilingual website.
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