Translation - Large Content Sites #222
Replies: 2 comments 3 replies
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Hello—Great to hear from you again! I'm interpreting your post has basically having two questions:
For the first one, I don't have any first-hand experience, unfortunately. I do a lot of multilingual work, but it's generally for companies or organizations that can't tolerate translation errors and have everything done by professional translators. Have you tried using frontier LLMs for translation? My sense is that the improvements here have been fairly dramatic, but I haven't done it myself. I had considered trying this for a personal project, where I would separate the documents into Markdown files across multiple folders with the same structure as the site and then ask Claude Code to translate them all, but I didn't move forward with it. For this part:
I generally use WPML or Polylang. In terms of workflow, I'll typically build out the entire site in the "base" language from which all other languages will be translated. If there's 100% parity between the two languages, I'll then use the multilingual plugin's workflow for duplicating the page to another language, allowing me to paste in the translated copy, or I'll train the client to do this themselves. (The non-parity case ends up being very dependent on client goals. I've had sites where a 25-page site in one language is a three-page site in another, sometimes with the pages structured in completely different ways.) How this scales depends on the site. For brochure-like sites with, say, 5–25 pages, it's generally not too arduous. Once you get into larger sites with, say, hundreds or thousands of posts, you'll likely want to do things in a more programmatic way and treat it as an import. This is more plausible since with thousands of posts, you're likely not looking at thousands of pages with bespoke designs, and you can likely focus on supporting a more limited number of blocks in the import process. Hope that helps! |
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Hi Greg, thank you for the detailed explanation - I really appreciate your effort on this support! I apologize for the delayed reply, I've been offline for a couple of days. I've experimented with the latest LLM models and they do perform impressively, but generic translations still produce like unnatural phrasing. I also tried automating the translation workflow via WP-CLI using Claude Code and the latest Codex, but clients weren't fully satisfied with the results (for the same reason), so we ended up going back to manual translation. I've been using TranslatePress on several past projects, but I'm definitely moving toward Polylang with client-provided translations going forward. It's still seems like the only way to guarantee natural results. I mainly asked because I was curious about your workflow with _tw on this field, so your answer was exactly what I needed - thank you! If you don't mind sharing, I'd love to see some projects you've built with _tw, whether multilingual or single-language. Always great to see how others approach it in real-world scenarios. I also recently watched your Tailwind CSS for WordPress Developers video on WordPress.com, really excellent content, well done! |
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You're very welcome! Really happy to hear you enjoyed the video, too. I'm ramping up for my first video since then: Basically a speed run of me building a custom theme with _tw. Once I finally get that out of the way, I'd like to do some deeper video content as well.
Agreed! A potential speedup I think LLMs could offer is in providing a starting point for the translations that could be reviewed by someone fluent in both languages. But again, my clients aren't doing that yet. If I were translating a site from French to English, I could see taking that route, as I understand French, but I'm not fluent.
If you email me at greg@gregsullivan.com, I can respond with some examples. They're agency sites, so I can't comfortably post them here. The site I built outside of agency work that supports the most languages is https://opcw.org, but it was build with Drupal, before I started using Tailwind. A different time! It uses Drupal's built-in multilingual support, and it doesn't have parity between languages, so its a bit of an interesting case study in that sense. |
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We are waiting for that update :)
Just sent! Thank you for sharing e-mail. I really appreciate it. This conversation has really helped me to check all the possibilities and find the right solution for my clients. |
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You're very welcome—I'll respond to you separately via email! |
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Hi Greg!
Since we’re building custom themes with _tw, I wanted to ask if you have any recommendations for handling translations on large content sites without using plugins.
For websites with 100+ pages, sometimes with custom templates, I’ve previously relied on automatic translation, but it tends to be unreliable for most of the content.
I’m curious how you usually approach this in such cases. Do you implement a custom translation structure, duplicate pages per language, or use some other method?
Thank you in advance! :)
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