Description
Translation plugins are built to answer one question: what has not been translated yet? LinguaDrift answers two different ones:
- What has drifted? Someone edited the English page three months ago. The German version still reflects the old copy. From the translation plugin’s point of view, the page is translated — nothing flags this.
- What is wrong? A machine translation mangled a product term, a link still points at the source-language page, or a placeholder got dropped. Nobody on the team reads the target language well enough to catch it.
LinguaDrift is an independent QA layer that sits on top of whichever translation plugin your site already uses (WPML or Polylang in this release). It never translates anything. It audits.
What it checks, free
- Missing translation — a published source page with no translation at all.
- Content drift — the source changed after the translation was last verified in sync. This is the core finding, and it needs a second scan to appear: the first scan establishes the baseline.
- Untranslated content — the target is byte-identical to the source.
- Placeholder mismatch — shortcodes,
%s, and{{merge tags}}that don’t match between source and target. - Markup mismatch — heading structure, link counts, or image counts that diverge.
- Suspicious length — a translation far shorter or longer than expected for the language pair.
- Link not localized — internal links that still point at the source-language version of a page.
How baselines work
LinguaDrift keeps its own record of what each source/target pair looked like the last time they were in sync, because most translation plugins don’t. The first scan for a language pair is a baseline scan — it reports missing translations and structural issues, but not drift. Drift reporting starts on the second scan.
AI agents
LinguaDrift registers read-only abilities with WordPress’s Abilities API (WP 6.9+), so agents like Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot can check status, list findings, and start scans — each ability is off by default and must be explicitly enabled per-ability in Settings.
Premium
LinguaDrift Pro is a separate add-on plugin that adds AI-backed semantic quality scoring, glossary enforcement, register/formality consistency checks, scheduled recurring scans, branded PDF reports, and alerts on top of everything in the free plugin. The free plugin keeps working untouched if Pro is deactivated — scanning, all 7 deterministic checks, and the findings dashboard are not limited in any way.
Installation
- Upload the
linguadriftfolder to/wp-content/plugins/, or install through the Plugins screen. - Activate the plugin.
- Make sure WPML or Polylang is active and configured with at least two languages.
- Go to LinguaDrift Dashboard. It shows which translation plugin was detected and the languages it found.
- Pick a source and target language and click Run scan. No further setup is required — this works out of the box.
- Optional: visit LinguaDrift Settings to limit which post types are scanned, toggle individual checks on or off, override a check’s severity, exclude specific post IDs, or opt in to deleting LinguaDrift’s data on uninstall.
- Optional: if you want AI agents (Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, etc.) to be able to query LinguaDrift through WordPress’s Abilities API, enable the specific abilities you want under LinguaDrift Settings AI agent abilities. Every ability is off by default.
FAQ
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Does LinguaDrift translate anything?
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No. It never writes to translated content. It only reads content and writes findings.
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Why didn’t my first scan report any drift?
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The first scan for a language pair establishes the baseline — the reference point drift is measured against. Run a second scan after some time has passed to see drift findings.
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Does this replace WPML or Polylang?
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No. LinguaDrift sits on top of your existing translation plugin and audits its output.
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What happens if I deactivate WPML or Polylang?
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LinguaDrift shows a notice that no supported translation plugin was detected and stays inert. It never affects your content either way.
Reviews
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Contributors & Developers
“LinguaDrift” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.
Contributors
Translate “LinguaDrift” into your language.
Interested in development?
Browse the code, check out the SVN repository, or subscribe to the development log by RSS.
Changelog
1.0.0
- Initial release: baseline/drift detection, 7 deterministic checks, WPML + Polylang support, findings dashboard, CSV export, read-only AI abilities.