The Google Translate Widget is a quick way to allow site visitors to see your content in another language. While most browsers support built-in translation already, you may still wish to display a language option on your site.
In this guide
To add the widget to your site:
- In your dashboard, click on Appearance → Widgets.
- Choose the location where you’d like to place the widget on your site. Standard options include the Footer and Sidebar, but this may differ depending on your theme.
- Click either of the + block inserter buttons (see right) to see a list of all the available blocks and widgets.
- Scroll down to the Widgets section and click on the widget once to add it to your site.
For more general information, see this guide on working with widgets.
Viewers can click on the Select Language dropdown menu to view a list of languages available for translation. Clicking on a language in the list will translate the site’s content into that language.
Once a site is translated, a Google Translate bar will appear at the top of the site to confirm the current language. Here, you can click the arrow next to the language to display the full list of languages to translate the site into a different one, or click on “Show Original” to return to the site’s original language. You can also switch languages right from the widget, too.
An alternative to the widget is using an automatic translation link to send visitors to a version of your site in a specific language.
Once the Google Translate Widget is enabled on your site, you can append a language code to your site URL to automatically translate the site to that specific language. For example:
- ?lang=id translates the page into Indonesian
- ?lang=de translates the page into German
- ?lang=es translates the page into Spanish
- ?lang=fr translates the page into French
- ?lang=zh-TW translates the page into Chinese Taiwanese
For most languages, two-letter lowercase abbreviations of languages will work. To find the language code of your choice, use this list of ISO 639-1 codes. Please note, however, that some languages need locales appended to the abbreviation, such as ?lang=zh-TW for Chinese Taiwanese.
This section of the guide applies to sites with the WordPress.com Business or Commerce plan. If your site has one of our legacy plans, this feature is available on the Pro plan.
Themes that support the Site Editor do not use widgets, so you won’t see Appearance → Widgets in your dashboard. Instead, you can install a plugin to add Google Translate to your site. There is no official Google Translate plugin, but there are several popular unofficial plugins that can add Google Translate language switching to your site.
