English Site ADDING Spanish Version

[SteveZero12]

I have an English wordpress site that I'd like to duplicate and translate in Spanish...does anyone recommend using a subdomain (espanol.xyz.com) or something like a .com/es/ format? I'm also interested in any SEO issues that might arise and want to keep SEO in mind while building this segment of the site. Any other tips or things to think of?

[kwoolf]

Oh man, multilingual Wordpress. Just got through with one and bounced through a few plugins. I finally settled on mQtranslate. Still, with the template that was chosen by the client, there was a lot to work getting all that squared away. There are usually settings in these plugins for pages and posts in each language to either skip missing translations or show the untranslated version. While you're probably safe from duplicate content because of the doc type lang declaration, it's still not a great user experience.

As far as domains are concerned, I'd definitely go with subfolders over subdomains simply because search engines will see all languages as a single site and not split rank between subdomains. Matt Cutts also recommends this approach if it's a technically viable option, but you can use alternate tags, lang tags, and other canonicalization methods to ensure both visitors and search engines get to where they want to be on your site.

One option you might want to consider is running a Wordpress Multisite with subfolders, one for each language. This keeps Wordpress content in different languages completely, absolutely separate and avoids the problems with plugins.

Hope this helps.

[JaneCopland]

Definitely use the rel="alternative" tag, also referred to as the hreflang tag, if you plan on direct translations and pages that are basically the same thing in either language.

Two good resources: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/189077?hl=en and http://moz.com/blog/using-the-correct-hreflang-tag-a-new-generator-tool.

I too would go for the subfolder option over subdomains for similar reasons to those Kevin mentions.

Are you translating the content by hand?

[SteveZero12]

@Jane,

Apologies for not replying (2 years) earlier.The project got delayed an other priorities took over.

I was thinking of translating via a plugin but preparing to eventually translate by hand because our industry has some very unusual technical jargon. Hopefully soon this project will progress soon.

Thank you for your response!

[JaneCopland]

Hello! Glad to hear the project should soon be progressing!

I haven't worked with automated translation in a while, so I'm not sure how good an automated solution would be nowadays, but a native-speaker editor at the least is probably necessary (and perhaps optimal if the jargon is particularly unusual).

A story for an example: my father is a swimming coach and was teaching some Arabic speakers, so he tried to translate the training session (full of swimming jargon) into Arabic. Everything went surprisingly well, besides the translation of "distance per stroke." The tool didn't know that "stroke" in swimming means the same thing as "stride" in running, and the translation read "distance per heart attack."