Title: GTS Translation Plugin
Author: stevevls
Published: September 11, 2010
Last modified: April 13, 2016
---
Search plugins
This plugin **hasn’t been tested with the latest 3 major releases of WordPress**.
It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when
used with more recent versions of WordPress.
# GTS Translation Plugin
By [stevevls](https://profiles.wordpress.org/stevevls/)
[Download](https://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/gts-translation.1.4.0.zip)
* [Details](https://wordpress.org/plugins/gts-translation/#description)
* [Reviews](https://wordpress.org/plugins/gts-translation/#reviews)
* [Installation](https://wordpress.org/plugins/gts-translation/#installation)
* [Development](https://wordpress.org/plugins/gts-translation/#developers)
[Support](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gts-translation/)
## Description
The GTS Translation plugin provides human quality translation by allowing you to
combine automatic translation and human post-editing (crowdsourcing). Your blog
content is initially translated by our translation server. The content is then post-
edited by human translators through our online editing system. You can use the GTS
community of translators, or you can assign the post-editing to your own community
of translators to maintain complete control of the process.
When you use the GTS Translation plugin, translated content is cached in your WordPress
database and indexed by search engines. This will increase the traffic to your website
and grow your international readership.
**Features:**
* Guaranteed to increase your traffic by at least 30% after 2 months; some customers
have seen over 100% increase in traffic
* Supports over 30 languages
* Uses private, secure translation server
* Publish translated content immediately or following review
* Crowdsourcing: create your own community of translators or use our community
* SEO: translates Permalink URL names and meta tags
* Custom online, side-by-side editor makes post-editing easy
* Translated posts can be retweeted
### Uninstalling
Simply click the “Delete” link in the plugin management window. This will delete
all of your translated data, so
please be careful!
### Virtual Host Setup
### How to setup the Virtual Host feature on the GTS Plugin
By default, the translated versions of your website/blog resolves to a URL address
which is a subdirectory of your site’s URL address. For example,
the Spanish version
of your site resolves to http://mywebsite.com/language/es.
With the GTS Translation Plugin Virtual Host feature you can publish translated
versions of yor website/blog under a separate subdomain or top-level
domain (TLD).
So for example, if your blog is www.mywebsite.com you can serve the Spanish version
from www.mywebsite.es. Alternately, you can use subdomains (e.g. es.mywebsite.com)
so that you don’t have to buy a domain for each language.
To implement the virtual hosts feature, follow these steps:
### 1. Configure DNS
**For Top Level Domains:**
1. Register your new domain (e.g. www.mywebsite.es.) with a recognized domain registrar.
2. In your DNS zone, set the A record for www.mywebsite.es to point to the IP address
of your web server.
**For Subdomains:**
1. Create a CNAME alias for your web server (e.g. es.mywebsite.com)
How to complete these steps will depend on your hosting provider. If you get stuck,
please follow up with your support team.
### 2. Configure your Web Server
Please note that all of the translated blogs will be hosted from the same WordPress
installation as your current blog.
**For Hosted Blogs:**
Your hosting provider will provide a control panel to map a hostname to a Document
Root. For each translated host name, enter the exact same Document
Root as your
blog.
**For Self-hosted Blogs:**
These instructions are only valid for Apache. If you use IIS or another web server,
please consult the relevant documentation.
First off, you need to be set up with Name Based Virtual Hosts (http://httpd.apache.
org/docs/2.0/vhosts/name-based.html). Once you have your blog’s
virtual host set
up, add the new hostname to the ServerAlias directive.
> ```
>
>
> ServerName www.mywebsite.com
> ServerAlias www.mywebsite.es
> DocumentRoot /path/to/wordpress/install
>
> # Other configuration here...
>
>
> ```
>
If you have multiple aliases, remember that the ServerAlias can be a list or can
include wildcards…it can save time!
### 3. Configure the GTS Plugin
This is the easiest part:
1. Go to the “GTS Settings” admin page.
2. Enter the host name in the “Virtual Host” input next to the desired language.
3. Click the “Save Changes” button.
Voila, translated links will point to your new host!
### Security
While providing high quality translation with our crowdsourced post-editing functionality,
it’s of the utmost importance
to ensure the security of your blog. We provide functionality
that is out-of-band of the traditional WordPress publishing cycle. As such, our
plugin adds a hook into your blog that allows GTS to programmatically update the
translated content in your local WordPress database. We’ve put a lot of thought
into ensuring that our system can use this hook while locking it against any potential
malicious users.
The first step to securing our system is to make sure that it’s really _you_ and
your blog requesting that your blog be
signed up for translation. First, we only
accept registration requests that originate from the WP admin page of the blog that
will be translated. When the user clicks off of the admin page, a digital fingerprint
is created and saved to your WP database, and then it’s sent over an SSL-encrypted
channel to our server. When the registration request reaches our server, we will
open an HTTP connection back to the requesting blog and verify that a) it has our
plugin installed, and b) using an encryption technique called hashing, that the
fingerprint matches. If one of those checks fail, we won’t register the blog for
translation.
Now that we’ve verified the blog, we’ll assign you a Blog ID and an API Access Key.
These will be automatically added to
your configuration panel via the registration
panel, plus they will be sent to your administrator email address. We will use these
two strings for identifying your blog and to ensure that information isn’t tampered
either en-route to us. It will also be used by your blog to verify that translated
content posted back to your blog is legitimate. Again, we use an encryption technique
called hashing. Whenever your blog sends a translation request to us or we send
translated content back to you, we create a signature (or hash) of that content
PLUS the API Access Key (if you’re really interested in details, using the SHA-1
algorithm). Provided that the API Access Key is kept secret, this technique is extremely
secure and resistant to tampering. The odds of a malicious person guessing your
API key are astronomical : more than 1 in 10^229. However, as with any password,
security depends on keeping it secret. If at any time, you think that your key has
been compromised, GTS will deactivate the current key and issue you a new one.
Other measures we take to secure data coming back to your blog include using a whitelist
of IP addresses that are allowed
to use the hook for posting translated content
and limiting the size of the post to ~250KB so that, even if all other measures
fail, an attacker can’t eat up all the memory on your machine.
We have dedicated lots of thought to locking down this system, and we are very confident
that it’s secure.
After reading this, we hope you will be too!
## Screenshots
* [[
* Translation Widget on your blog
* [[
* Side-by-side Editor
* [[
* Popup Editor
* [[
* Crowdsourcing Admin Panel
## Installation
1. Upload the plugin directory to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory or install
via WordPress’ automated install feature.
2. Activate the GTS plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in your WordPress blog’s admin
area.
3. Register with GTS and follow the workflow to configure your blog and prepare it
for translation.
4. _(Recommended)_ Add the GTS Language Selector widget to one of your theme’s [widget panels](https://codex.wordpress.org/Appearance_Widgets_SubPanel).
5. _(Optional)_ Designate a virtual host for each language in the GTS Settings panel(
e.g. fr.myblog.com). First, be sure to speak to your system administrator about
configuring virtual hosts.
## FAQ
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](http://translate.gts-translation.com/api/supportedLanguages).
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.
## Reviews
### [Support is Non-Existent!](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/support-is-non-existent-1/)
[villacastellamonte](https://profiles.wordpress.org/villacastellamonte/) September
3, 2016
Emailed several times using the support links they request to no avail — not a single
reply to any of them. Their one review says they are responsive to support…I wonder
which of their support people posted that one. Deinstall!
### [holy chet](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/holy-chet/)
[Den999](https://profiles.wordpress.org/den999/) February 7, 2017
This is incredibble stupid translator. This is chinese? No!: ПОКРОЯ。 ЗАВЯЗЫВАЕТСЯ
エネルギー ШЕЕ。
[ Read all 3 reviews ](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gts-translation/reviews/)
## Contributors & Developers
“GTS Translation Plugin” is open source software. The following people have contributed
to this plugin.
Contributors
* [ stevevls ](https://profiles.wordpress.org/stevevls/)
* [ davegrun ](https://profiles.wordpress.org/davegrun/)
* [ sergeyvlasov ](https://profiles.wordpress.org/sergeyvlasov/)
[Translate “GTS Translation Plugin” into your language.](https://translate.wordpress.org/projects/wp-plugins/gts-translation)
### Interested in development?
[Browse the code](https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/gts-translation/),
check out the [SVN repository](https://plugins.svn.wordpress.org/gts-translation/),
or subscribe to the [development log](https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/log/gts-translation/)
by [RSS](https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/log/gts-translation/?limit=100&mode=stop_on_copy&format=rss).
## Changelog
#### 1.4.0
* Translation of non-English language websites and blogs.
#### 1.3.1
* Compatibility testing for recent versions of WordPress.
#### 1.3.0
* Compatibility testing for recent versions of WordPress.
#### 1.2.2
* Default WP widgets are now translated
* Disabled translated theme support for WP 3.4+ due to incompatibilities with theme
code reorganization in 3.4
#### 1.2.1
* Added support for server-side fetching and translation of new posts when automatic
publishing is stalled
* Fix problem of broken links of translated pages:
- top level pages with ‘/%category%/%postname%/’ permalink structure
- second(and more) level pages with ‘/%postname%/’ permalink structure
* Fixes problem of GTS widget working incorrectly for Static Home Pages
#### 1.2.0
* Avoid possible warning message when language specs aren’t available yet.
* Download language specs at plugin activation. Fixes problem reports with registration
if languages aren’t available yet.
* Added error messaging and a method for manually initiating language download
before showing reg screen.
#### 1.1.9
* Option to auto-detect browser’s language and display the website/blog in the
user’s language (after user is prompted).
* Support for automatic localization of twentyeleven theme.
* Remove possibility to download language specifications from page delivery path(
causes problems for hosts which cannot connect to GTS API).
* Don’t render widget if language specifications haven’t been downloaded from GTS
API.
* Ignore errors when closing .mo file handles (avoids irrelevant error messages
in the server log).
#### 1.1.8
* Comments rendered LTR unless WPLANG is Arabic or Hebrew.
* Fewer terms translated immediately upon signup.
* Be more proactive about checking validity of downloaded .mo files and remove
invalid files during cron job.
#### 1.1.7
* Right-to-left language support.
* Send plugin version with API Client requests so responses can be tailored (e.
g. RTL language require 1.1.7+)
* Minor bugfix where bloginfo(‘language’) returned empty string when blog is in
English.
* Return locale name (per WP behavior) instead of language code from bloginfo(‘
language’).
* Translate title text for categories and posts in WP nav menus.
* No more 404 for non-nested pages when permalink consists of only the post name(
no fix possible for nested pages).
* Widget now rewrites links using virtual hosts when set.
* Send 301 redirects to virtual host when a translated blog request comes in via
any other host name.
* Find nested pages in translated languages if parent page hasn’t been translated
yet.
#### 1.1.6
* Chinese support : Language pattern matching changes and quoted widget JS array
keys.
* Added search functionality in translated blogs.
#### 1.1.5
* Added support for translation from English to Japanese and Portuguese.
* Fetch supported languages from remote API rather than hard-coding them (allows
auto-addition of languages going forward).
* Removed packaged .mo files and implemented logic to automatically fetch them
from WP’s SVN repository.
* Moved HTML Comment w/ plugin version from widget to section with alt links.
* Added logic to drop indexes when upgrading DB schema as workaround for WP bug.
* Increased language code length in DB schema to support non-standard language
codes (e.g. zh-CN, zh-TW).
* WP 2.9.X : compatibility fix for custom taxonomies.
#### 1.1.4
* Fixed possible PHP Warnings when calling add_language_to_home() function
* Added explicit UTF-8 character set declaration to database table creation script.
#### 1.1.3
* General support for non-latin languages
* Support for translation from English to Russian
* Improved localization using dynamically-loaded .mo files
* WP 3.1 : category and tag links weren’t properly due to iternal changes and admin
pages
* WP 3.1 : avoid link rewriting for admin bar links when looking at page with non-
source language.
#### 1.1.2
* Presentation changes to widget
* Localization of home link with options filter on home and siteurl
* Bugfix for 404 on pages with language specific hostname.
#### 1.1.1
* Support for custom taxonomies.
* Support for static home page.
* Bugfix for English text in excerpt under certain conditions.
#### 1.1
* First official release!
* Resolve bug where WP table prefix starting with number caused table creation
to fail.
* Added remote API calls for activation, deactivation, and uninstall to keep plugin
in sync with backend.
* Improve schema migration as plugin version progresses.
* Fix compatibility issues with permalinks consisting of only the post name.
* Filter non-translated content from translated pages
* add elements to HTML head to link to different language versions of pages.
* Increase minimum WP version to 2.9
#### 1.0.b9
* Resolve bugs with nested categories and other various bad permalinks as a result
of the changes in 1.0.b8.
#### 1.0.b8
* Remove ID positional parameters from post, tag, and category links so they appear
more WP like and to avoid conflicts with other
plugins or .htaccess files that
control the permalink format.
#### 1.0.b7
* Fix widget bug with multi-word category link rewrites.
#### 1.0.b6
* Support for multi-tag and multi-category URLs
* Resolve conflict between widget and Simply Exclude plugin
#### 1.0.b5
* Rework splash page and remove Beta Text.
* Bugfix with theme translation iframe callback.
#### 1.0.b4
* Fix missing image on the widget
#### 1.0.b3
* Bugfix for incorrect widget behavior triggered by certain themes.
* Minor CSS tweaks to widget
#### 1.0.b2
* A handful of minor bugfixes.
#### 1.0.b1
* Initial limited beta release
## Meta
* Version **1.4.0**
* Last updated **10 years ago**
* Active installations **10+**
* WordPress version ** 3.0 or higher **
* Tested up to **4.5.33**
* Tags
* [crowdsourcing](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/crowdsourcing/)[translate](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/translate/)
[translation](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/translation/)[translations](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/translations/)
[translator](https://wordpress.org/plugins/tags/translator/)
* [Advanced View](https://wordpress.org/plugins/gts-translation/advanced/)
## Ratings
2.3 out of 5 stars.
* [ 1 5-star review ](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gts-translation/reviews/?filter=5)
* [ 0 4-star reviews ](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gts-translation/reviews/?filter=4)
* [ 0 3-star reviews ](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gts-translation/reviews/?filter=3)
* [ 0 2-star reviews ](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gts-translation/reviews/?filter=2)
* [ 2 1-star reviews ](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gts-translation/reviews/?filter=1)
[Your review](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gts-translation/reviews/#new-post)
[See all reviews](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gts-translation/reviews/)
## Contributors
* [ stevevls ](https://profiles.wordpress.org/stevevls/)
* [ davegrun ](https://profiles.wordpress.org/davegrun/)
* [ sergeyvlasov ](https://profiles.wordpress.org/sergeyvlasov/)
## Support
Got something to say? Need help?
[View support forum](https://wordpress.org/support/plugin/gts-translation/)
## Donate
Would you like to support the advancement of this plugin?
[ Donate to this plugin ](http://www.gts-translation.com/)