How to Add Google Translate to Your WordPress Blog

Although machine translators still leave a lot to be desired when it comes to reliability and accuracy, adding one to your blog does present the opportunity of being able to render your content in a great number of different languages. Particularly if you use your WordPress site as an online store selling products or services to a global market, being able to quickly and easily translate your most important content can help you to expand your reach. Currently supporting eighty languages from around the world, Google Translate is currently one of the world’s most popular online machine translation services. You can add Google Translate to any self-hosted WordPress blog by way of a plugin, the most popular being the free Google Language Translator which we will be using for the purpose of this tutorial.

 

1. Log in to your administrator control panel and navigate to Plugins > Add New. Search for Google Language Translator and download and install the plugin. Activate it once it has been installed.
2. Open the Settings page by clicking on “Settings” in the sidebar to the left. A new submenu will now be available entitled “Google Language Translator”. Click on it to configure the plugin.
3. Ensure that the correct original language of your website is selected, otherwise the plugin will not function correctly. Customize any other settings as required, and then click “Save Changes”.
4. To permanently add Google Translate to your blog, navigate to Appearance > Widgets and drag the new Google Language Translator widget into the widget area of your choice in the right-side column. In addition to the sidebar widget area, your currently active theme may provide several more widget areas elsewhere on the page. Change the widget title if you wish, and click “Save”. Visitors to your website will now be able to translate any page they are viewing by choosing a target language from the dropdown box in the sidebar.
   Ggle Trnslte Widget
5. To add Google Translate to a page or post, paste the following shortcode into the editor: [google-translator]
6. To add Google Translate to the footer or header of your website, add the following line of code to the footer.php or header.php file for your currently activated WordPress theme:

   <?php echo do_shortcode(‘[google-translator]’); ?>

   You can find edit these files from within WordPress by navigating to Appearance > Editor and opening the files from the list in the right-side column.
   Ggle Lang Trnslt