Website translation

Can You Use DeepL to Translate Your WordPress Website?

Can You Use DeepL to Translate Your WordPress Website?
Elizabeth Pokorny
Written by
Elizabeth Pokorny
Elizabeth Pokorny
Written by
Elizabeth Pokorny
Reviewed
Elizabeth Pokorny
Reviewed by
Updated on
December 21, 2023

Website translation is imperative for business websites wanting to operate on a global scale. In fact, over 50% of Google searches are conducted in languages other than English. 

The moral of the story? You can drive more organic traffic when your website caters to other languages.

But what if you’re not multilingual? Fortunately, translating your website is much easier when you use one of the many online translators available on the market.

Cue DeepL 

DeepL is well-renowned for being one of the most accurate online translators out there. However, although DeepL effortlessly translates texts and other content, it doesn’t provide a “website translator” dedicated option. As a result, you can’t use DeepL to translate your entire website.

If you currently think DeepL is the best way to translate your WordPress website, this post is for you. We’re exploring why and when DeepL is the right choice and why there are better alternatives available.

Introducing DeepL: The Main Advantages

DeepL offers a free, simple translator on its website that can translate text and files into 26 available languages. There’s also a Pro plan that unlocks unlimited text translation and better data security. 

That said, let’s talk about some of DeepL’s most notable benefits:

1. Security

All texts using DeepL are deleted immediately after translation, so you don’t have to worry about sensitive data being stored. In addition, for extra security, DeepL boasts end-to-end data encryption and is fully compliant with EU data protection policies.

2. Accuracy 

Undoubtedly, accuracy is DeepL’s biggest strength – when compared against competitors, DeepL outperformed them by 3:1. 

DeepL is powered by advanced AI (artificial intelligence) technology and provides plenty of translation customization options. For example, for more natural and nuanced translation, DeepL proposes alternative words or phrases. Then, you simply click and choose whichever sounds the best. The tool even presents formal and informal voices for you to choose from in languages where this features heavily, such as German.

You can also create your own glossary to define the translation of specific words and phrases according to your brand or project. On top of this, DeepL has a built-in dictionary that enables you to look words up and learn the translation for yourself.

3. Scalability

All DeepL premium plans offer unlimited text translations and enable you to add two or more users to your account to collaborate on your translations. 

You can also translate a limited number of files (depending on your chosen pricing package) up to 10MB in size, including HTML documents.

And finally, with DeepL’s highest pricing tiers (Advanced and Ultimate), you can integrate with your CAT tool, like Trados Studio, memoQ, and Across. 

Weglot is the website translation industry leader on G2

Can You Use DeepL to Translate an Entire Website?

As we’ve already said, DeepL’s one of the most popular text translators for its nuance and accuracy. This is why you can trust it to do an excellent job translating specific sections of your website, like an ‘about’ page or individual blog posts.

However, there’s no DeepL feature that automatically translates your entire website

This is where a third-party solution becomes necessary. 

Using just DeepL, you would have to manually copy and paste your entire website into the DeepL translator. Then, you would need to copy and paste the translation back into your website. 

This isn’t feasible for many reasons – not least because it would take a great deal of time. But on top of that, there’s a high risk of human error as you might overlook buttons, banners, and other small text snippets that need translating.

We dive deeper into this subject in the video below and show a simple way of using DeepL for website translation.

Let’s look at the other option:

DeepL has a translation API that can connect your website to DeepL’s translator. In essence, this feeds your website content to DeepL’s translation software. Once the translation’s complete, DeepL provides you with the translated version of your content. 

DeepL Pro vs. DeepL API

To avoid any confusion, let’s quickly outline how DeepL Pro and DeepL API work. 

For starters, these are two slightly different services, and one is more integral for website translation than the other.

DeepL Pro is intended for anyone needing to edit lots of individual texts using the DeepL translator. As we’ve already hinted at, you can translate a specified number of files per month up to 10MB in file size with a premium plan. You also unlock glossaries, additional contributors, and you can copy and paste as many characters as you want.

In contrast, the DeepL API mainly translates XML markup, HTML files and links DeepL’s translator service to your website. This service has a free version and paid options. The latter is based on usage per month and costs 20 euros per one million characters.

Why Weglot is The Better Option

Although DeepL is one of the most accurate translation services, it wasn’t explicitly designed to handle entire website translation. Instead, it relies on its API and additional plugins to manage the translation for you. 

Fortunately, there are other services available that cut out the middleman, saving time and hassle.

This is where Weglot comes to the table. 

Weglot is a leading WordPress translation plugin that, unlike DeepL, doesn’t require any technical knowledge. You’ll never have to access its API (Weglot does that automatically for you). 

In comparison, it’s much more user-friendly. You only have to install one plugin, and you’re ready to translate all parts of your website. Not to mention, you also have complete control over your own glossary and exceptions. Plus, you can manually make corrections to each translated string and even invite collaborators to look over the translation with you. 

Best of all, Weglot allows you to make manual edits to any of the machine translations given by DeepL. 

On top of all that, the plugin comes with the following standout features:

  • Translates and displays your site’s content. A multilingual website involves more than just translating the content. As we mentioned if you just used DeepL you’d have to manually copy and paste all your translations back into your CMS. With Weglot, it combines DeepL with its software to automatically display your site’s content under language subdirectories. What’s more, it automatically detects all the content on your site. 
  • A visual in-context editor. Here, you can edit translations from the frontend of your website, so you can edit the machine translations to fit your translation quality and see where the length of the new string might have changed the formatting.
  • Visitors auto-redirection. This automatically detects your visitor’s location and re-directs them to a version of your site that’s been translated into their preferred language. 
  • URL translation. You can even automatically translate pages and post URLs for better SEO rankings in other languages.
  • SEO-optimized. Weglot follows multilingual SEO best practices, including translated metadata, language-specific URLs, and automatically added hreflang tags. 
  • A fully translated customer journey. You can use Weglot to translate the entire customer journey, including landing pages, popups, and emails.

Weglot also uses leading machine translation providers like Microsoft and Google Translate and chooses the machine translation provider based on the language pair you’re translating from and to for the most accurate result. In total, the plugin supports over 100 languages, including Portuguese, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, custom languages, etc., trumping DeepL’s range by far.

Learn more about choosing the best WordPress translation plugin for your website through this quick video:

Are You Ready to Translate Your WordPress Website?

High-quality website translation is no easy task. It heavily relies on using accurate translation software that ensures every part of your website and customer journey is translated, including popups, landing pages, buttons, widgets, WooCommerce stores, URLs, and more.

DeepL is an excellent solution if you’re looking for a quick fix to translate parts of your WordPress Website. However, there’s no native option for translating your entire WordPress website without creating a manual API integration. Yes, you can use plugins to help overcome this struggle. However, this often requires you to pay for both your DeepL account and the plugin. 

Whereas, if you opt to use Weglot, you can streamline the translation process of your entire website and customer journey. Not to mention, you benefit from fast, accurate, and automatic translation. On top of that, you can manually override and correct translations with the help of collaborators, and edit word strings from your website’s frontend/WordPress theme  

Start your Weglot 10-day free trial.

Discover weglot

Ready to display your website in multiple languages?

Try Weglot on your website for free (no credit card required).

Icon blog

In this article, we're going to look into:
No items found.
Try for free