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What's so special about our plugin?

Most of the other translation widgets and plugins, like those that are powered by Google and Microsoft, provide on-the-fly translation of your blog content. This has two negative aspects: first, the translation that your reader sees is raw machine translation which is known to be of questionable quality. Second, the content is not indexed by the search engines, which means that readers can not find your translated content on search engines and you lose out on valuable search engine traffic.

The GTS plugin provides human translation quality which is far superior than the other plugins. And the translated content is cached on the same server that your blog is hosted on. Search engines will index your translated content and your blog will come up on keyword searches. This will drive more traffic to your blog.

How is the translation done?

Translation is a 2-step process. In the first stage, your content is translated by our own machine translation server. Then, the translated content is edited by human translators who review the machine translation and make the necessary linguistic corrections. After the content is edited, a moderator reviews the content again to verify that it meets quality standards. Once the moderator approves the translation, the post goes live on your blog.

Who does the translation?

You have two choices: you can use your own people to do the human editing, or you can use the GTS community.

If you have associates that are qualified to edit the translation, or if you yourself are proficient in another language and can edit your own translation, then you can control the process yourself through the GTS Plugin Admin panel. This Admin panel allows you to assign Editor and Moderator priviledges to your own network of people so you can keep the process in-house.

Or, you can have the work done by the GTS community which is a worldwide network of hundreds of translators and language experts.

Are comments translated?

No. Comments are are passed through as-is.

Which languages are supported?

• Input: English
• Output: Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, and Turkish.

We're continually adding new languages, so for the latest list, click here.

What URLs will the translated blogs have?

By default, the translated blogs will be accessed in subfolders of your main blog URL. So for example, the French language blog will be accessed via http://blogname/language/fr. The Spanish language blog will be accessed via http://blogname/language/es. And so forth.

If you want to assign your foreign language blogs to a subdomain or a TLD (Top Level Domain, like blogname.fr), you can do so by making the apporpriate configuration settings on the GTS Plugin area of your WordPress Admin panel.

Which character encodings are supported?

UTF-8 only. Note that WordPress is configured to use UTF-8 by default. If you require another character encoding, please send a feature request.

How does the plugin work?

When you publish a post in WordPress, our plugin will send that content onward to GTS. When we receive it, the content will be immediately passed through our machine translation software. Then, it will become available for our crowdsourced editors to begin the post-editing process. They will improve the quality of the translated content, after which, crowdsourced moderators will review the improvements. When the translated text is ready for prime time, one of the moderators will approve it, and the human-translated post will be sent back to your blog.

Additionally, when you first sign up with us, our system will pull in some additional information. In order to get your translated blog looking good from the get-go, we do an initial translation of all your blog's tags, categories, pages, and the posts that appear on your blog's home page.

Where is the content stored?

Before the translated content is approved, it is stored on a staging area on our own secure servers.

Once the translated content is approved by a moderator, it is stored on your own server in your WordPress database. We'll also keep a copy in our database in case the moderators or editors decide to make more changes.

When I switch my blog to Russian, Japanese, Chinese, etc. all I see are question marks...what gives?

This happens when the data is stored in MySQL with the wrong character encoding. Execute the following SQL (being sure to replace 'wp_' with the prefix specified in wp-config.php if you've changed that value):

ALTER TABLE wp_gts_translated_options CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET 'utf8';
ALTER TABLE wp_gts_translated_posts CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET 'utf8';
ALTER TABLE wp_gts_translated_terms CONVERT TO CHARACTER SET 'utf8';

Then get in touch with us so that we can help you reload your content.

I enabled Chinese language, but hardly any of the links work. What should I do?

In order to work correctly, translations to Chinese require plugin version 1.1.6 or greater. Version 1.1.5 will translate your posts, but won't properly display them. Upgrade using your WP Admin panel, and you'll be good to go.

How do I use the virtual host feature?

Please see the Virtual Host Setup section in the Other Notes tab.

What is theme translation?

Your WordPress theme is made up of a series of PHP files called templates.

My header link to the home page isn't localized properly. What do I do?

If you are using theme translation, these links should be handled automatically. Otherwise, you're probably using the bloginfo('url') or home_url() function. Replace bloginfo('url') or echo home_url('/') with gts_get_homepage_link().

I translated my theme, but now it's mangled. What should I do?

Unfortunately, translating PHP source files correctly is tricky business and doesn't always work correctly. If you have translated your templates and want to revert to the originals for your translated blogs, untick the "Use translated templates" checkbox on the GTS configuration page.

I translated my theme, but there's still a bunch of English text?

Like above, it's tough to sort out what should be translated. Plus, there are probably random English text strings embedded in the PHP source, function arguments, etc. In order to get the most out of template translation, try these tips:

• Wherever possible, try to keep your text outside of PHP code blocks.
• If you must embed English text in PHP, then surround it with the WP __ function or its variants e.g. random_php_method('hello') becomes random_php_method(__('hello')). IMPORTANT this only works for single-quoted arguments. recognized functions are:
  • _e
  • translate
  • esc_attr__
  • esc_attr_e
  • esc_html__
  • esc_html_e.

Some english language text comes from deep down in WordPress' code, so you probably won't be able to get 100% of the text, but you should be able to get the lion's share taken care of.

I wrote a post with a ton of text, but it never gets translated...what's happening?

There is a maximum entry size of 256KB...roughly equivalent to 75 pages of single-spaced text. Have you run into that limit?

Are there any incompatible plugins?

Unforunately, yes. Here is a list of plugins that cause problems with the GTS Plugin:

• Uniquefier : incompatible with multi-byte character sets. Posts come out as ? marks.
• ICanLocalize : inserts invalid HTML into the post body.
• Recently Popular : directly selects posts from the DB, so plugin hooks are bypassed.
• Another WordPress Classifieds Plugin (aka AWPCP) : Classifieds cannot be translated and URLs produce 404 for foreign languages.
• Title-Case : doesn't properly support non-ASCII characters, resulting in capitalized letters in the middle of words.

This list is a work in progress and may grow as we roll out to more users.

How secure is the system?

Please see the Security section in the Other Notes tab.