Deepl and WPML, an automatic and efficient translation for WordPress.

One of the things that I didn’t like about WPML was the amount of work, and copy paste that I have to do if I wanted to translate content. The easiest and cheapest way to translate content with WPML was using Google Translator and copy the text to the translation manager. That was time consuming and a repetitive work. Therefore, I went out to try Weglot, a fast and accurate multilingual translation plugin. But after testing Weglot, I noticed that the plugin could be expensive to maintain for me due to the amount of written content that I have in my blog, and also I wanted to have at least 5 languages. 5 languages multiplied by the number of words that I had in my website, made me reach pretty soon the word limit of the Weglot’s Pro Plan. I faced myself into the decision, paying more for another Weglot’s plan or go back to WPML. Paying almost €2000 per year was not an option. I changed back to WPML and I noticed that WPML was starting to improve their automatic translations. Couple months after I changed, they announced a big deal for the WordPress Automatic Translations, Deepl arrived to WPML. Deepl is a german based service that has a pretty accurate translation, better than Google Translator. For now Deepl has a few number of available languages they could translate. For WPML automatic translation you have to pay an extra fee depending on the credits that you use. WPML automatic translation is based on credits and not in the word count, as in Weglot. Actually, it may sound as word count, but there is a technical difference. The difference relies that with WPML you can have more control in which content you will spend your credits, and which translation service will you use for it. For example, Microsoft translation costs 1 credit, Google translations costs 2 credits, and Deepl translations costs 3 credits. So, you can choose which translation service you want to use and how will you spend it. In that, WPML has more control than Weglot, nevertheless it is worth mentioning that it is still time consuming, but way much better than in the past. I wanted to get deeper into the price comparison between Weglot vs WPML, I’ll try to get the exact price of a word, of course if I am not wrong. In the monthly Weglot Business plan, you pay $23.38 dollar for 50000 words, which is $0.00046 per word. In the yearly Weglot Business plan which gets cheaper, you pay $233.77 per year, which per month is $19.48 for 50000 words, which is $0.00038 per word. In a monthly payment for up to 100,000 WPML credits you pay $17, which if you use Deepl 3 Credits, that means it is 33,333 words, which is $0.00051 per word. As you keep using higher number of credits in WPML, the price gets lower. Nevertheless in that comparison Weglot shows better price per word. The big BUT cames when Weglot establishes a Word Limit, and in WPML when you pay again for the credits you have new credits that you can use to translate new content. Actually there is no word limit in WPML. And even so, for now I am using free Deepl Windows Plugin to have a faster copy-paste of selected phrases, and combining the automatic translation. Read more in Deepl and WPML.