If you’re looking to reach more visitors and customers outside of your native language market, you really only have two options.
You can either hire someone to translate all of the text for you, or you can use a translation tool or software to get all of your content translated into the foreign language of your choice.
As you might imagine, it tends to be cheaper to use a translation tool than an actual human for this task.
However, some translation tools give you less than accurate results and you should strive to get the closest translation to a native speaker from one of these tools, without having to pay for a native speaker.
So, let’s look at your options for the best online translation tools for your site’s content.
Best WordPress Plugin For Translations
If your site is on WordPress, then the quickest and easiest way to turn your English content into a foreign language is by using a translation plugin.
There are multiple options out there that have this functionality, but only one seems to be able to consistently deliver translated content that looks like it was written by a native speaker.
GTranslate is the best website translator plugin for WordPress sites.
This means you need to pony up the cash and pay for this premium WordPress translation plugin – and you will be glad that you did.
GTranslate can translate any HTML website and make it multilingual.
It will help you to increase international traffic, reach a global audience and explore new markets.
While there is a free option of this plugin, it doesn’t offer enough functionality to be of real benefit to site owners.
But, fortunately, there is a free 14-day trial of GTranslate, so you can see how it does with the content on your website.
Pricing starts at $9.99 per month.
Though, I think for most website owners, the Business plan at $29.99 per month is going to be the best option – however what is interesting to note is that you can turn on features on the Custom plan, which may save you some money.
It all depends on your website translation needs and what languages you need translated.
Our opinion: if you can afford it, then look no further than GTranslate for your website translation needs.
Online Translation Tools And Apps
If you prefer to use an online translation app or tool, then you have a few different options to choose from.
Some of these are 100% free, while others operate on the freemium model where you have to pay for longer texts and such.
DeepL
If you’re not familiar with it, DeepL offers some of the best online machine translation for websites and documents.
And it has both free and paid versions that you can use.
DeepL’s neural networks are able to capture even the slightest nuances and reproduce them in translation unlike any other service.
In blind tests pitting DeepL Translator against the competition, translators prefer DeepL’s results by a factor of 3:1.
DeepL also achieves record-breaking performance according to scientific benchmarks – and lots of big companies use DeepL.
And it has a pretty decent collection of languages that it can translate.
Most popular translations: Spanish to English, French to English, and Japanese to English.
Other languages you can translate with DeepL: Bulgarian, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, German, Greek, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovak, Slovenian, Swedish, and Turkish.
Our opinion: If you don’t need a WordPress plugin, then DeepL is the next best option for you – outside of hiring a native-speaking translator.
Reverso Translation
While most people are familiar with Google Translate, Reverso Translation is an alternative option that operates in a similar manner.
The big difference for most people is that this is a freemium tool.
If you want to translate longer texts, then have to pay for the premium version of this online tool.
What I really don’t like about Reverso though is that the Premium plan only gives you a limited amount of text it will translate each month.
The fine print reads: up to 6,000 words/month (monthly plan), 50,000/year (annual plan).
They do offer a higher plan for people who need more words translated.
Reverso Pro gives you 250,000 words per year.
That’s still not a ton of words for the money and I can only see this being good for someone who has a lot of documents that need translated.
Our opinion: If you just need your website text translated, then this is not the tool for you.
Google Translate
This option is listed last both because most people tend to already know that it exists, and because it is not the best option for translating a website.
In fact, if you were to use Google Translate for your website’s content, then it would likely read as if it was not written by a native speaker.
There are countless stories online of people using Google Translate and ending up with translated text that is basically gibberish.
But, for quick on-the-fly translations, or translations while traveling, Google Translate and the Google Translate app are a great choice.
However, Google Translate should not be used for translating website texts if you want quality translations.
Our opinion: This should really be a last resort option for your website translations.
Final Word
As a website owner interested in reaching audiences outside of your native language, you have a lot of options for translating text.
However, there are a lot of quality differences among the options available to you.
We highly recommend the GTranslate plugin for most website owners who don’t need documents translated.
But if you do need document translation on a budget, then DeepL is the next best option that we recommend.