Hi !
I am struggling to find a translation plugin for my website. I LOVE Translatepress, their look and feel, the easyness to translate strings on the frontend with a "What You Translate is What You Get" approach. Awesome !
What I don't like is the way they translate articles, string by string (to be fair, block of text by block of text). There's no room to re-arrrange an article that way : when you fix a typo on your original article, you will break your match and loose your target translation.
Now, I was considering Polylang. Eventhough the plugin looks older, their approach is more close to the original WordPress minset. Each original article can be translated to a target language with a simple clic. What it does is, it creates a new postl, likely there's a meta somewhere like a "language = fr_FR", and then the plugin displays each candidate article on the front page and on the single post views, based on the current language. Easy, very simple.
BUT. There's no real link between a translated article and its source unless I am mistaken. That's what I'm not comfortable with. A target article is created and is now shown in the list of WordPress articles, so that you can create dozens of foreign posts and end up having, say a French website that has absolutely nothing in commion with your translated website because some articles won't be translated.
To me, a translated WordPress website MUST have the exact same articles whatever the displayed language. AND when the plygin is disabled, translated posts should not appear anymore, which is not the case with Polylang you keep all your translated content, and this content is displayed in the middle of your source content.
What I would love is a plugin that has the following approach :
- One original article can be translated, or not.
- Each translated article is linked to its source.
- If an article is not translated, its original version is shown.
I am overthinking ? Probably yes but I'd like to hear from you guys.
Thanks!