One of the big issues facing a site owner who has content in multiple languages, is that they need to ensure they have translated all content into all languages.
Missing or or out of date content reflects badly on you as a site owner. But how do you reconcile content across languages?
Moving Target
Keeping up with your website content is difficult enough if there is only one language; content is deleted, links are broken, new stuff is added and changes are made.
Multiply this by the number of languages you support and it get complicated.
Add on mulitple authors using different languages and the task of ensuring you have all of your content correcct in all of your languages gets exponentially worse.
There are two solutions to this problem:
Manual Reconciliation
You setup some sort of manualy reconcilliation system with check boxes, and auditing to ensure your content is up to date.
For anything above a small website this will be a tedious time consuming process.
If only there were an automatic way to do this …
How I Solve This Problem For My Clients
There is always a plugin is my mantra. When I build client sites, I use a couple of plugins that checks on all content in a website and alerts me if:
- New content is added needing translation
- The original piece is updated and I’ve not added an update to the other languages
- If I’m sending content out to a translation team I can set a deadline and get alerts if the work has not been done on time
The plugin I use are WPML translation management and WPML translation analytics.
They are both part of the WPML suite of plugins, and you need the full premium version to do what I am discussing.
Translation Analytics
Transltion analytics is a pluign that gives a visual representation of how your translation project is progressing, it shows you
There is also a dealining system built into this pligin so you can set a timescale to compelte your project. This is really useful if you are working with other translators and have a tight timeframe for completion.
Buiklting into the dealining system is also an alertying tool which will let you knoe if uyou are dropping behjing with your translation work
Here is a screen shot from the translation analytic tool. As you can see I’m pretty far behind on my Chinese work.
Translation Management
This is my favourite tool for reconcling content, translation managemeent shows you a list of posts pages or other content that needs to be translated or is in need of an update.
Using this I can see where I need to focus my attention and what needs to be translation. here is a screen dump of the managements screen. you can see my pages are in need of some updates and translations
Wrap Up
Reconciling content across languages is a tricky thing I recommend WPML to automate that process so content doesn’t slip through the cracks of yoru
Disclosure: if you buy a copy of WPML through my link I will receive an affiliate commission.
Photo Credit: Daniel Kulinski via Compfight cc