 My name is Matt, I'm a technical evangelist at DigitalCube in Japan. I speak Polish, English and German. I used to be a supporter at the WP ML multilingual plugin where I had the opportunity to deal with many, many multilingual websites. And this somehow inspired me to create this presentation. I will tell you a short story about my beginnings with WordPress. Everything started around 2008. I was basically a user getting all the knowledge about WordPress from the internet, codex, WordPress support forum, but I was never active in the community. Everything changed when I started being active in the WordPress community. I met all the great people full of passion who share their knowledge, they are open to share their knowledge. So definitely it's worth being active in the community. Like it was said before, I'm originally from Poland but currently live in Japan. I am really happy to be a speaker tonight and share my knowledge with you. And my roots are in Polish community. I help organize local meetups at my hometown which is Wroclaw. I also helped to organize World Camp Poland in 2014 and volunteered at World Camp Sofia which was the World Camp Europe in 2014. A short information about my company. I'm the tech evangelist from DigitalCube. I'm promoting product called Immemoto WordPress web hosting based on Amazon web services. Our company is also really close to the WordPress community. Everything started around 2006. We believe WordPress and open source will make web a better place. We are now around 15 members. We are all WordPress contributors. Around 90 to 99% of our projects are related to WordPress AWS. Our developers develop teams, contribute to the WordPress core, translate WordPress in different languages. We've made over 93 WordPress plugins available from the repository. One of the popular, probably you know, Contact Form 7, one of our team members have created this plugin and now he's working on a multi-lingual plugin, Bogo. I will also tell you a little bit more about that. We definitely go to events all around the world. We like to sponsor them and be active in the community and share our knowledge with you. Let's start with a small, let's focus on the multi-lingual topic. First let's start with some stats. On the slide above you can see the number of internet users on different continents. As you can see Asia and Europe has the biggest number of users. It's a giant market full of potential customers. All you need to do is find a way how to get to them and I think translating your website is a good first step to do that. Let's have a look at the number of internet users by language. As you can see, English has the biggest number. English-speaking users are the biggest number. Next is China, Spain, Arabic languages. But top 10 languages, over 55% of websites on the internet are in English. That's more than a half. Other popular languages are Russian, German, Japanese, and even Poland somewhere at the end. I hope this gives you an idea how it's important to run your website in more than one language to increase the number of the visitors that you will have. Let's talk about the benefits of having a multilingual website and having your content translated. You can see some examples of definitely bad translations, mechanical translations that are quite unprofessional. But doing the translation correct way you can reach more customers. You can enhance your professional image. You can increase the trust of your visitors and your website will be more CEO-friendly. And Google definitely will like it. And if Google does like it, you will be higher in the search results. From my own experience as a foreigner in Japan, when I look, for example, for a place to eat lunch, I use Google Maps. I almost always visit the English search results because I don't know yet Japanese. And I want to avoid situations that happened to me, for example, that I ordered chicken bones and had no idea what that was. Because the Japanese people don't have English language menus or anything, so you have to be careful about that. Anyway, Google definitely promotes the websites with, for example, in my case, English language. And it shows you them first in the search results. So if you want to attract, for example, tourists, foreign customers, if you run a store, co-working space, you definitely should think about an English page, a website that will help those people to get to you. Let's talk about types of translations. The fastest way to translate your content is to use the machine translations. It's good for emergency translations but very often full of misspellings and logical errors that often lead to misunderstood content on your website. You can test, for example, a plugin called Google Language Translator, but you will notice that the only human translators are able to understand the different cultural, linguistic, semantic factors to leave the same effect that is in the source text in the base language. That type of translations are made by humans and we will focus on them. We will split the human translations into three groups. In-house translator, for example, a company employee who is bilingual or your friend who can speak good enough a second language and will help you with the translations. Freelance translators, those are professionals that you can hire on online or offline for a specific project. Translation agencies, similarly to the freelancers, you can help find them on offline online, but they will be better optioned for a specific project that requires more focus translation on a specific topic. On the slides, you can see some of the most popular translation services and websites where you can find professional to translate your website content. One of the websites I can localize is integrated with one of the translations plug-in and I will tell the details about that later. Before sending your whole website to translation, you should consider what effect do you want to achieve. Do you really want to translate your whole website or only a specific part which will allow users speaking in a different language to find the required content? Also, you need to keep an eye on the cultural circles and cultural differences. For example, you can change only language for specific websites elements like headers, text, buttons, etc. Or if your target are clients, for example, Hebrew or Arabic, you should reconsider the design of your website because they read from right to left, so some design elements that you use at your base English or French website won't work anymore or will look weird. In some cases, you don't even need a plug-in. For example, you can create only one page in the second language with required information where there will be the most important details. Everything depends on what you're doing. You can also consider a specific category or custom post type for the second language. You can create a duplicate of your current website and put all the details in French but the biggest disadvantage of this solution is you have to maintain two websites, update them, take care of the plug-in. So it's like a double work. It depends how big is your website and if does this make sense? Or if you finally have enough knowledge, you can think about running a WordPress multi-site installation. It's basically a network of WordPress websites connected with each other, so this is also an option. If all the suggested methods before didn't work for you, you should consider using a plug-in. There are many plug-ins, but remember you don't have to kill a fly with a cannon. Before you choose pay solutions, try some of the free plug-ins and check if they work for you, if they are satisfying for you. Also, a very important suggestion from an ex-supporter. Don't enable all the languages that you have available, because this won't work. This will affect the performance of your website and even crash your website. In the worst case scenario, so only use the languages that you really want to translate your website because very often I had cases that people just enabled everything and said, my website is slow. Let's start with the first plug-in, multilingual press. It's based on the powerful WordPress core future multi-site that I mentioned before. It enables you to create a network of sites in different languages, all interconnected and related to each other. It comes in two versions, free. The pro option is you pay only for the support. So you can download this plug-in and use it for free without any problems. Another popular free plug-in is Polylang. Basically, you write posts, pages and create categories and post-tags as usual and then define the language for each of them. The language is either set by content or a language code in URL, or you can use a different subdomain or a domain per language. Polylang comes also with a language switcher that is a widget or it can be added to the navigation menu. For a professional or automatic translation service, you can add an add-on that is called Lingotech Translation. For example, you can send the content of your website using this add-on directly to a professional translator. Another plug-in is QTranslateX. It advertises itself to be super easy as working with a single language. With QTranslate, you can also describe which fields need to be multilingual to a JSON and content configuration file which is described exactly in the configuration guide. Sorry. Bogo, the plug-in that I mentioned before created by Takayuki Miyoshi, a colleague from my company who is the author of Contact Form 7. It's very easy and contact-config-free. You basically assign one language per post and it doesn't create any additional custom tables in your database. So it's really light and very simple to use. I would like to also mention something that isn't very popular. It's still in beta version and not officially published, but it's available on GitHub, which is bubble. And I won't get into the details. It's just for your knowledge that something like this exists. And finally, we got WPML, one of the most popular paid multilingual plugins. It's a very complex solution with a lot of features that sometimes are too many for many users. WPML allows you to create translator accounts on your websites. And it's integrated with ICANN Localize.com service, which allows you to send the contact directly from your website to the professional translators. From my experience as a supporter, ex-supporter, the most common issues related with this plugin were related to performance on a big number of enabled languages and compatibility issues with other plugins and teams. The thing is, the compatibility issues are not always fault of the WPML, but some of the plugin or team makers claim to be compatible with WPML. But in reality, they aren't. And some of them fix the compatibility issues after contacting with them, but some of them don't care. And you need to look for another solution or that can be also problematic in the future. Another option worth mentioning is that WPML has a free multilingual, WooCommerce multilingual extension. It's available from the WordPress plugin repository. And it's something that allows you to create an e-commerce store. During World Camp San Francisco in 2014, Andrew Nacin said that the future of WordPress is global. I fully agree with that. WordPress has a very big potential, currently running over 25 of the websites globally. And you need to remember that there's no perfect solution yet for translating a website. And everything depends from your need. You need to check most of those plugins and see what works perfectly for you. Don't be afraid to experiment, but try to keep it as simple as you can to avoid performance issues and user confusion. Merci. I can say it also in Japanese, so arigatou gozaimasu. And thank you for listening. Thank you, Matt. So we have time for a few questions. Thank you very much. Sorry I was not there at the beginning, so perhaps you gave the information. But when you use this plugin, does it create a copy of each page? At the beginning I said that you don't have to always use a plugin. Everything depends how big is your website, what is the content. Sometimes you just need to create specific one page or specific content. If you use a plugin, everything depends from the plugin. Some plugins create extra database tables. Some plugins are really easy and just create something like a taxonomy or a second post. So everything depends from the plugin that you use. And when it's translated, is it automatic and is it trustable? Nothing happens automatically. And like I said, there is Google automatic translation add-on. But in most cases, those translations doesn't make any sense. They don't have logic, so you always require a human translator. Check that. Thank you very much. Thank you, Matt. I have a question. I said theme developer. And I'd like to ask you about the WPML plugin. I would like to know if I can find anywhere like a check-up list to make sure that my team is compatible. What would you recommend? You can contact the compatibility team. There's a dedicated group of developers in WPML and they will advise you how to make your team fully compatible, what are the things that you should take care to make it compatible. OK, thank you. Thank you for your talk. Thank you. Thank you to be here. I have a question about the SEO problematic. How does plugin handle with that? And does those plugins are... Sorry, which plugin? Anyone? Any of the plugin, OK. And is this compatible with the SEO just plugin? Depends from the plugin. Like I said, Bogo is a really easy, really conflict. It doesn't cause any conflicts, so everything depends from a specific situation. You just need to check those solutions if they work for you. Because sometimes after an update, a plugin that was compatible suddenly is not compatible because the developers did some changes. They didn't expect that this will influence that specific thing that will cause those connections to be not compatible. Hi, thank you. I have been involved in a project where, of course, at the end of the project, the client came up and said, oh, by the way, we have to add an Arabic version. And because it could apply to Japanese too, maybe. I was wondering if you had any feedback or experience about right-to-left languages. Basically, they use a different layout. Sometimes you read from up to down. It's also an option. From my experience, it's better to create a specific design, especially for that. So I would advise a multi-site or a different website dedicated for that. Or just multi-lingual site for us from the France, from Germany, because they do it really right. Well, thank you for the talk. Just a crazy question. It might not be worth translating everything in a website. Yes. Have you ever come across a solution where only the home page has been translated and a few parts of the navigation menu and having just some translated abstract of some of the posts? You can put something that, if a user comes to your home page, can add some widgets of the site that are in, for example, English and redirect you to only one English website. And this works quite well. It should be in a place that is noticeable for the user. And I would say anything that works for you. And if you check that, for example, people use this, you have conversions that get the people there. So why not? Everything depends from you and from your website. OK. Thank you very much. Thank you.