WordPress in different languages. My blog becomes international.

Hi,

today just a quick post.
The fact that my friends and readers are now both – German and English speaking people – made me think to write my blog in both languages. But I could never find a reasonable solution… and I was afraid of the double work. :)

But now I could find finally a WordPress-Plugin which is converting the blog in a real multilingual webpage. It’s called “qTranslate” and available in the WordPress-Plugindirectory. Just install it and make the settings in the admin area of WordPress. As default languages is set up German, English and Chinese (I think). The Chinese we can delete straight away (unless you want to use it of course).

Then you should activate definitely “Hide content that is not available for the selected language.”, otherwise it happens that all the existing article are also displayed in the other language. The result is duplicated content.
To my surprise, nothing changed after I clicked it. All my existing German article were also displayed in the English version.
If blog articles already exist, then the plugin copies them into all other languages. This is crap. But can easily be reset. Click on “Advanced Settings” and in “Convert database” on the 2nd “Click Here” (just read the text before, just in case if something changes).
And then we can start.

Now, when you add a new article or page, you’ll see for all languages a separate input field and can actually make the site multilingual.

Why not just take one of the existing plugins to translate the page automatically? Do you have ever seen a text which have been translated from the Google Translator from German into English? Yes? Then you know why. It just comes out with crap. If you are lucky then you can get the sense of the text, but it is never a correct English. And also the other way when something is translated into another language.

And since Google is committed to quality, you only get good rankings with quality and good articles. Not that my English would be perfect … but better than the Google … I hope :)

Where we’re at it. Since I have over 200 articles in my blog (which are sometimes very long), it will probably take quite a while until it is completely translated to English. Please be patient. :)

Greetings
Gordon