Multi Language WordPress website with 2 installs advice

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I have a potential client who wants a HTML website migrated to WordPress, the current website is 100 pages; 50 English and 50 French of the same content. There are several reasons for moving to WordPress, and having an English and French version of the same site instead of just a translator plugin. So enough back story, my real questions is…

How do I deal with running 2 WordPress websites (one English the other French) when a visitor wants to change a specific page from English to French for example? and avoid going back to the home page when requesting to change language?

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If a visitor is viewing a specific page in English but wants to view it in French, I do not want the Language selection button to take them to the home page really. How can I do this in WordPress; with 2 separate installs so when you click the language button the page just changes to the requested language?

I hope someone can help me, Thank you.

Luke

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2 comments

  1. No need to make 2 separate websites . Just use qTranslate.

    It is hands down the best solution for multilingual wordpress installation, and I myself have used it with over 100 multilingual sites

    The management and maintenance would be much easier , you will have a control over all aspects of the multilingual behavior and you could SHARE resources ( like scripts, images , themes etc ) .

    With this plugin you can choose if you want to have a URL like :

    • http://www.mysite.com/fr and http://www.mysite.com/en
    • http://fr.mysite.com and http://en.mysite.com
    • http://www.mysite.com/?lang=fr and http://www.mysite.com/?lang=en

    All your users will see is a small flags based or menu based language switcher .

    The Admin screens easily share languages , switching, and content handling . Even switching the admin area language itself is a breeze .

    You even have control over local SEO.

    Every aspect from title to media to custom fields is also supported . Basically you have duplicate fields for title content etc . The best way to understand is just install one time and start to use .

    you will get the idea in a second .

    It has a very extensive hooks base and custom functions that allow you to easily do virtually everything !

    Example of a working ( old ) wp install with qTranslate supporting 5 languages can be found here

    P.s.

    I am in no way affiliated with the author of this totally free plugin – But I do admire the work he has made and the techniques used in his code . If you end up using it – a small token of appreciation for the author would surely be appreciated by him .

    Edit I after comment.

    Grammar or the correctness of the translation is irrelevant .

    qtranslate is not an automated translation service / plugin

    It does not really translate your site , but gives you the tools to do so in terms of UI, accessibility, functions and hooks.

    The actual content is translated by YOU. No automatic content generation ( unless you specifically want one )

    It actually does create 2 different websites ( in a sense ) but using the same install, core files, resources etc ..

    Until you will not try and use it , you will not fully understand how it works.

  2. WordPress Multisite Language Switcher is the way to go.

    • Every language version gets its own WordPress blog
    • You get a “Network Root” where admin tasks spanning all two blogs are done
    • Posts/pages can be associated between the two language sites

    This is like WordPress.com hosted blogs.

    I use this plugin on a blog successfuly. I worried about routing some time: which URL should be canonical? foo.com/bar or foo.com/en/bar? This became an issue when my client wanted to install a separate .de domain instead of using the virtual sub folder /de/