Have you ever thought about translating your WooCommerce store into other languages?
Often new store owners think that they’d need a separate website for each language. That’s not true. You can easily translate your existing WooCommerce store into other languages.
In this guide, we’ll show you how to translate your WooCommerce store using two different methods.
Why Translate Your WooCommerce Store?
According to a recent study, 75% of customers prefer to purchase products in their native language.
Viewing product information in their local language helps customers make the decision faster. This also creates a better customer experience which results in more sales.
Translating your online store into several languages is particularly helpful in the following scenarios:
- You ship internationally and the majority of your customers speak other languages.
- You sell digital products which are available in several languages.
- You are targeting audiences in multiple countries and regions where English is not the native language.
The best way to translate your WooCommerce store is by using a WordPress multilingual plugin.
We’re going to share two different WordPress plugins that can do the job well.
Method #1: Using TranslatePress to Translate your WooCommerce Store
TranslatePress is the best translation plugin for WordPress available. It allows you to easily translate the text on your site through a point and click interface.
Firstly, you need to install and activate the TranslatePress plugin.
Note: You can use the free version of TranslatePress to translate your site into 1 other language. For unlimited languages, you need the Pro version of TranslatePress.
Upon activation, you then need to install and activate the Extra Languages add-on for TranslatePress. Simply download this from your TranslatePress account.
After activating the Extra Languages add-on, navigate to the Settings » TranslatePress page in your WordPress admin. Here, you need to click on the License tab to enter your license key.
You will find your license key in your account area on the TranslatePress website. Just copy and paste it into the box then click the Activate License button.
Then, click on the General tab. Here, you need to check that your default language is set correctly. You also need to choose the additional language(s) to use for your store.
To add a language, select it from the dropdown list and then click the Add button next to it.
Go ahead and repeat this process for all the languages you want to use for your store.
You can also customize other settings here. For exmaple, you can select how to display the language selector on your site. There are a lot of different options to choose from.
After you’ve made the changes, click on the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom of the screen.
Now that you have configured basic settings, let’s start translating your store. Simply click on the Translate site tab at the top to launch the translation editor.
The translation editor in TranslatePress, will show a live preview of your website to the right and the translation panel in the left column.
Go ahead and click on any links here to move to different pages of your site. In the preview panel, you can simply take your mouse to the text you want to translate and then click the Blue pencil icon to edit it.
You will then see the translation pane on the left-hand side of the screen. You can just type the translations here for that text. You can do this for any or all of your site’s languages.
When you’ve finished, don’t forget to click the ‘Save translation’ button at the top of the screen.
Now, go ahead and visit your website to see your translated product. Simply click on the language switcher and change it to your desired language.
The text that’s created automatically by WordPress and by your plugins should be automatically translated.
Note: You can create your own translation for this text if you want. Text created by WordPress or plugins is shown with a green pencil icon in the TranslatePress translation editor.
You can carry on translating the rest of your WooCommerce product page, and your site’s text in the translation editor.
Tip: You can also automatically translate your website using TranslatePress and Google Translate. To do this, you need to create a Google Cloud account and set up an API key.
To set up automatic translations, visit the Settings » TranslatePress » Automatically Translate page. You need to choose Yes for ‘Enable Automatic Translation’ then fill in your Google Translate API key.
If you don’t want to go through the process to create an API key, you could use Google Translate manually. To do this, simply copy sections of text into Google Translate then paste the translation into the translation editor.