Adding a new language in Wordpress the easy and quick way

Say that you already have a monolingual or bilingual site in wordpress and you want to quickly add content in a new language that you or your customer requires.

I realised that this is can be a very time consuming job.

It can also be quite confusing since many times you don't have any idea of that new language content that you will be adding.


Say for example you want to add the German (Deutsch) language. I use Polylang and if you have one-by-one translation texts, then an outline of the process you have to follow is this:

1. Install Polylang plugin (in case you currently have one language only)
2. Add Deutsch language in Polylang
3. Add all texts of the new language
4. Add all menus in the new language and associate to the corresponding pages and posts

As you can see this will be quite slow and error-prone.

If we want to make things faster we could use this process:

1. Install Polylang 
2. Add the language in Polylang
3. Duplicate all English pages and custom post types that you need to translate
4. Bulk edit all posts, change language to "Deutsch"
5. Edit each "Deutsch" posts and translate it.
6. Bulk edit all "Deutsch" posts, change status to "Published"
7. Duplicate all English menus to Deutsch as draft
8. Associate Deutsch menus to its corresponding pages and posts.

Step 3 can be done easily using the Duplicate Page plugin, here is the link:

https://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicate-page

Menu duplication can be done using the Duplicate Menu plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/duplicate-menu

Duplicating English pages

The advantage of the approach outlined below is that eveything is duplicated. Post images, page properties, categories, tags, dates, authors etc. Therefore this process makes it impossible to forget settings, properties and other stuff when translating.

1. We use the "Filter content by language" feature of polylang and we select the English language from the menu

2. Duplicate each page/post:

By default the duplicated post will be created as draft, so you don't need to worry.

After duplication of all required posts use bulk edit of all drafts to change the language to Deutsch
Select all Drafts by just selecting the drafts filter from the Pages selection:

Then bulk change the language of the selected dtaft pages/posts: