Now that we are living and trading in a more and more global economy we must start to think outside of our own backyards.

With the power of Wordpress websites we can. How user friendly does it feel when you visit a website that is written outside of your native language and there’s that little dropdown box offering you the choice to change the language of the entire website? It feels great right, nice and simple for you. But here’s the catch. You can’t just go to any old Wordpress theme and install multilingual software then set and forget. Your Wordpress theme needs to be compatible with the software.

Here at Aus Digital Media we design Wordpress websites using themes that are tested and proven to work with our preferred multilingual software. And the software we use is WPML 

Head over to wpml.org to have look at the demo video on their home page.

Multilingual WordPress

Only 25% of current internet users have English as their preferred language according to Statista.com. Do you only want to appeal to 25% of the marketplace?

WPML multilingual website software is also compatible with WooCommerce so all your products and your shopping cart system with be displayed smoothly in each language of your choosing.

Languages supported

Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Albanian, Arabic, Armenian, Basque, Bosnian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Czech, Esperanto, Estonian, Finnish, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Korean, Kurdish, Latin, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Moldavian, Mongolian, Nepali, Norwegian, BokmÃ¥l, Persian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Punjabi, Quechua, Romanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Somali, Swedish, Tamil, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Uzbek, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish, Zulu

Yes, that’s right. WPML multilingual website software can translate your website from English to Zulu!

Still not convinced? How about the fact that China now has half a billion middle class that prefer to buy all their products online rather than in the traditional marketplace.

The number of internet users in China reached 537 million in June 2012. This has driven the explosive growth of the Chinese e-commerce market, which is expected to triple and surpass the U.S. online marketplace by 2015. It is now predicted that the estimated 193 million online shoppers in China will increase to more than 350 million by 2015, generating a transaction scale of 2.6 trillion yuan. In comparison to the business-to-consumer and consumer-to-consumer sector, the business-to-business e-commerce sector currently generates the greatest amount of revenue. 
Image credit; Statista.com

Here's the legendary Jack Ma from Alibaba group talking about e-commerce in China.

Point to note;

The WPML Wordpress plugin does not automatically translate your website into another language. It merely provides the infrastructure for you to place the translated words on each page and post on your site. So you will either need to speak the second language or employ a translator. Translators can be found easily online on sites like Fivver.com and the WPML website also has a list of contractors who can work with you.

Now the best thing you can do when translating your website to another language for another country is employ someone from that country who speaks the language natively and fluently. You don’t want to translate your content word for word No No No.. You need to make sure that your translator is translating your content INTO the native language. and the translation might include local colloquialisms, This is very important, especially in the eyes of a search engine like Google.

Learn more

WPML multilingual website software is currently offered at no extra charge as part of our combined website design and hosting package. Here’s a link to learn more.