Automatic website translation: what it does and doesn't do

Automatic website translation means software finds the text on your site, translates it with a machine translation engine, notices when the original changes, and puts the translated pages online. Those are four separate jobs. Software can do the first three without help, and the fourth, publishing, is where you decide how much to trust the machine. Each job can go wrong in its own way, and publishing is where a person should look before visitors do.

Two different searches#

People who search for automatic website translation want one of two things. A reader wants to understand a page written in a language they do not speak; their browser can offer to translate it, and the site owner has no part in that. A site owner wants the site itself to exist in other languages, at its own URLs, for every visitor and for search engines. The rest of this page is about the site owner's version.

The difference matters because a browser's translation leaves no trace on your site. Nothing is indexed, nothing is reviewed, and you cannot fix a mistranslated product name. If you want visitors in another language to find you and trust what they read, the translation has to be part of the site.

Job 1: finding the text#

Before anything can be translated, the software has to know what text the site has. There are two ways in.

A crawler reads your pages the way a search engine does: it fetches the HTML, follows links and collects the text. It is thorough on content pages and does not need anything installed. It can miss text that only appears after scripts run, such as a cookie banner, a cart message or a filter label.

A plugin inside your CMS sees content as it is saved or rendered, so it knows about a page as soon as it exists. It still has to deal with text that themes and other plugins add.

Either way, check the parts of a site that crawlers and editors forget: form validation messages, empty-cart and no-results messages, the 404 page, and emails your site sends. A page can look fully translated until someone makes a typing mistake in a form.

Job 2: translating it#

This is the part everyone pictures, and the part machine translation does fastest. On a website, two inputs make a visible difference to what the engine produces:

• A glossary, so your brand name, product names and feature names come out the same on every page, or stay in the source language.
• A formality setting for languages that distinguish a formal and an informal "you", so the homepage and the checkout address the reader the same way.

Short strings are the hardest case. A button that says "Book" could be a noun or a verb, and "Free" could mean no charge or available. An engine translating the string alone has to guess; one that sees the whole page has a better chance.

Job 3: noticing changes#

A translated site goes out of date with the first edit to the original. Tools handle this in different ways.

Some translate when a page is visited. Weglot's help center, for example, says translations are "generated and added progressively" when someone, whether a visitor, the site owner or a search engine crawler, opens the site in a translated language. To translate everything up front, the same article says you can visit the translated pages yourself or use Weglot's Manage URLs feature. Without one of those, a page nobody has opened in a translated language has no translation yet.

Others are told about changes. A plugin can report an edit when it is saved, or a CMS can call a URL when content is published. Others re-crawl on a schedule and compare. Each approach also has to decide what an edit costs: whether the whole page is translated again, or only the sentences that changed.

Job 4: publishing#

Publishing is where a mistake reaches customers. A translation that goes live straight away is fast and needs nobody's time. It also means the first person to read the German version of your pricing page may be a German customer.

The alternative is to hold machine output until someone approves it. That costs a reviewer's time, so it is worth being specific about which pages need it. A sensible split for most sites:

• Review before publishing: home, pricing, checkout and signup, legal and policy pages, and any page that makes a promise about price, delivery or refunds.
• Review soon after: product and feature pages, top landing pages.
• Spot-check: older blog posts and help articles with little traffic.

Our guide to machine translation post-editing covers what a reviewer checks on each pass.

What search engines think of automatic translation#

Google's spam policies list "scaled content abuse": many pages generated "for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users." One of its examples is scraping feeds, search results or other content to generate many pages, including by "automated transformations like synonymizing, translating, or other obfuscation techniques", where "little value is provided to users."

That example is about other people's content run through a machine to make pages. Translating your own pages so customers can read them in their language is a different thing, and Google's documentation on localized versions explains how to mark such pages with hreflang. The policy's test is whether "little value is provided to users." A translation nobody has checked, full of wrong product names, is closer to that line than one a person has read. Our article on whether machine translation hurts SEO goes further into what Google has said.

What automatic translation leaves to you#

Software translates text. Several things on a translated site are not text, and no translation tool decides them for you:

• prices and currencies, and whether a market sees a converted or a set local price,
• text inside images and video,
• legal pages that need a lawyer in the target country as well as a translator,
• which pages to translate at all.

Our guide to making a website multilingual takes those decisions one at a time.

How LangRelay automates all four jobs and checks pages before they go live#

LangRelay is built around those four jobs. The WordPress plugin tells LangRelay about a saved edit within about a minute, and LangRelay translates just the changed text; unchanged text is neither translated nor billed again. Sites on other platforms can call a Change hook from their CMS or deploy pipeline when content changes. Translation follows your glossary and, for six languages, the formality register you set.

By default a translation goes live as soon as it is ready, and free checks hold any page that looks wrong: text left untranslated, the wrong language, a translation far longer than its source, or a changed number or price. Legal pages, pricing pages and sweeping changes always wait for you. To approve every page yourself, choose Ask me first. To keep that from becoming a bottleneck, a reviewer can approve many rows at once in the Translation grid, or click a line in the Visual editor and edit it in a side editor with a live preview. Relay, our agent, drafts the changes you ask for in a sentence. Relay reviews any page you ask it to, the way a language expert would, and tells you the cost in AI credits before it starts. The translation quality page explains the review setup, and our article on website translation cost shows what the automatic part costs per month. To see the approval queue on your own site, book a demo.

Questions people ask about translating a website automatically#

Is automatic translation good enough to publish without review?#

For low-traffic pages where a clumsy sentence costs little, many site owners accept it. For pages that state prices, terms or promises, a person who reads the language should check the result first.

Does automatic translation pick up new pages?#

It depends on the tool. Some only translate a page once it is visited in a translated language; others are told about new and changed pages by a plugin or a hook. Ask how long a new page takes to appear in each language.

Can I translate my website automatically for free?#

Several tools have a free tier for small sites. LangRelay's Free plan covers one Site in one language with 2,000 words a month, and like every plan it puts translations live by default, with free checks that hold a page with untranslated text, the wrong language or a changed price.