Recently, I’ve found more and more clients wanting to have their sites available in multiple languages. This is a perfectly understandable requirement in today’s ever more connected world, but it does raise an interesting problem. “How exactly can you offer your site in multiple languages?”.

While there are a few “manual” solutions, such as the good ol’ method from decades ago, where you’d set up an entirely different sub-domain and host a clone of your site, but with translated copy in it, to the slightly more recent version that does the same thing, but instead stores the content in a database and dynamically pulls it in based on a user’s setting. These solutions, however, are often very time consuming, expensive and create even further overhead with any extra pages/content you build in the future.

There are some other services I’ve found where you can send them content and they’ll translate it for you on the fly. While these are equally good, it can seriously weigh down a site as it’ll have to wait for translations before it can display content to a user, or you’ll have to get all your content translated beforehand, like above.

Enter the live translation providers...

I know I’ve written up a previous article a while ago about a service called “WeGlot”, but I wanted to shed some light on another such service called “Localize.js”. The thing I rather like about these services is that it massively simplifies the process of translating your site, while still giving you total control over the contents of your site.

For example, you only need to set up your account, attach a code snippet into your site and enable the languages you want to have as options in your dashboard. Load the webpage and any and all detected phrases will be sent to your Localize.js dashboard ready for your approval. Here you can decide what will be translated and what won’t, anything you decline goes on a “Blacklist”, so you won’t have to worry about it every time.

Anything you approve is that machine translated into the language of your choice and presented for review. Here you can edit the translations if they’re incorrect and also mark them as “human reviewed”, showing that you’ve confirmed the translation is correct. This not only helps improve the accuracy of the system itself, but makes a note for anyone else using the account that this phase has been reviewed and is correct.

Bubble itself also has native plugin support for this system, adding in some new workflow elements that will allow you to create your own “language change” interface if so desired, simply ensure the language is enabled in your dashboard, set up the workflow to change to this language and you’re good to go!

While services like this do have a limit on the number of languages you can have active at a time, the “origin” language doesn’t count towards this cap, and you can always expand the number by subscribing to their higher-tier plans if you need it!

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