Translate your website content

Learn how to use Smartcat Website Translator to automatically translate your website content into multiple languages and manage translation projects with ease.

With Smartcat Website Translator you can automatically translate your website into any language on the fly and then, if necessary, adjust the translation, polish it, and bring it to perfection with manual edits. Let's delve into details and see how it's done.

Automatic translation

To translate your website into any language, proceed as follows:

  1. In your browser, open https://www.smartcat.com/website-translator/ an procceed to log in/sign. Skip this step if you are already in your Smartcat account. 

  2. Select to translate website on your account homepage. 

3. Enter the URL of your site to the form above and specify the source ( from ) and target ( into ) languages. You can translate the site to multiple languages, therefore the into field accepts multiple values.

4. Smartcat will create a translation project which you'll be able to find on your Projects page. All the translation options including editing and professional review are available for this project.

5. You can adjust the preview settings using the gear icon at the upright corner of the screen. The available options are:

  • Translation mode. Here you can choose how the translation will be rendered for your website visitors. 

  • Language selector. Here you can choose how to locate the language selector to best fit your website design. 

  • Preview settings. Here you can select to start the translation of a page as soon as you enter it. 

  • Publish settings. Here you can decide which languages to publish. This option comes in handy when your website is being translated to multiple languages and not all of the translations are ready at the same time. 

5. When you switch to a new language, the site is rendered in the original language and the Start translation button appears in the toolbar. Click it to have the site translated to another language. Note that your Smartwords balance appears in the toolbar and is instantly updated to keep you aware of any changes.

In addition to automatically translating your website, Smartcat allows you to edit the resulting translation and tailor it to a particular vocabulary or cultural and social preferences of the specific target audience.

Editing

  1. Click the Edit button in the toolbar to open the translation you've just previewed in the Smartcat Editor. 

  2. After you've made all the required changes in the Smartcat editor, click x in the Editor toolbar above. It redirects you to the website preview that reflects all the recent edits. 

Note that the percentage of automatically and manually translated content is shown respectively in the buttons beside the Language field. To publish the translation hit the respective button at the top of your website page.

Publishing

To publish the translation hit the respective button at the top of your website page.

A message will appear informing you that in order to publish the translated version of your website the following script must be added to the website header.

Click Copy code to save the code in the buffer. Paste the code to a text file and send the file to your Web designer. Refer to this article for the detailed instructions for a Web designer.

As soon as the code has been added, click Validate and continue. Smartcat verifies that the JavaScript snippet appears on each relevant page and publishes all the existing automatic and manual translations.

Publishing means that snapshots of each translated page from your website are gathered and stored in a cloud. The embedded script retrieves and displays them. Whenever a visitor accesses your web page and switches to another language, they will not be hitting Smartcat to dynamically download the translations, but they will be getting static snapshots.

The Smartcat script injected to your website code not only retrieves and displays all the available translations, but also renders a selector that your site visitors will use to switch to the required language.