Disappointed I realized that WordPress still does not provide options for multilingual blogs originally. I don’t understand that, because obviously many people have exactly this problem: how to get the WordPress blog multilingual.

While searching for a solution, I basically found three useful options:

• Plug-in qTranslate
• Plug-in WPML
• Using the multisite feature of WordPress itself

qTranslate

When I tested this plug-in I saw quite fast that it does not provide slug translation for posts, pages, categories and tags. This way this plug-in is useless in my opinion, because without a slug translation search engine optimization is basically impossible.

Obviously the original plug-in developer did not like or had no time to implement that feature yet, but although there are already other guys dealing with that issue (see this forum post), I don’t want to use such an incomplete plug-in right now.

WPML

On the first sight WPML looks like a good alternative. It is not free (anymore), but I don’t mind paying some dollars for a good plug-in.

But there are following reasons why I will not use it and asked for refunding my money (which is possible within 30 days):

1. I want to have all languages (including the default one) in a subdirectory and this is not supported by WPML. The workaround provided in the forum is a little bit too “hacky” (you never know which problems you’ll get with such hacks later on).
2. it is unhandy that WPML does not allow to have tags and categories with the same names and slugs for different languages. If different languages are placed in a subdirectory (or even subdomain), there is no need to have cross-language unique names and slugs.
3. there is a bug in WPML where posts are losing the translation relation to each other. No explanation or solution was provided therefore till now.

But I would like to add that refunding the money was done very fast (within few hours) as promised by the company; so it’s save to test WPML yourself.

WordPress Multisite

Obviously there are not many options left. Therefore I go this way now.

Of course, there is a drawback with this solution, too: translated posts are not directly linked to each other and therefore the reader cannot switch to another language of the post easily. But maybe I’ll create a plug-in to fix this later on myself.

At least you don’t need to rely on other plug-ins for multilingual blogs with this solution.

Here I explain how to add language selection flags although using WordPress Multisite.

And which option you are using for your multilingual blog?