Add different language option to the web

[mauellano]

I want to have my web both in English and Spanish so I want to add in the top right corner a button to switch between Spanish or English.
I can’t find a way to do this. ¿Anyone can tell me a way to do this? ¿How to have the web in two languages and have the option to switch from one to other?

[Richard]

Dear @mauellano

Commonly one would use a language translate plugin to do this,
Recommended and used by Lay Theme users are:

Polylang:
https://polylang.pro/

And Q-translate XT:
https://github.com/qtranslate/qtranslate-xt

Here on the Lay Theme Website we have some documentation on this:
https://laytheme.com/documentation.html#multilanguage

Hope this helps and best wishes! :)

Richard

[mauellano]

I have the texts translated to two languages (english and spanish). But I just want to do have a switch button in the top right torner to switch from English to Spanish (for international clients) . So what you recommend me to do for having the web like this? I dont want a translator. Just a duplicate of the web in a second language in the top right corner

[Richard]

Dear @mauellano

That a tricky one,
Its dependent on the Permalink structure of your pages, normally the way a language plugin works:

You set a 'home' language - it our case english so we reach a page with the permalink :

example.com/pageabout

However a language plugin will create a duplicate of each page and assign a language code to the permalink, so:

example.com/nl/pageabout

The language switch button makes all links clicked to have this /nl/ ( dutch ) placed in front of the standard permalink redirecting it to the correct language.

So my thoughts are you first need all the pages of a particular language to have a 'language code'.

Then you need a piece of jQuery, JS code added that first knows that your language button has been selected - probably via a simple cookie setup

Then if the browser knows that the button is pressed, it makes a links that are clicked to have your language code place into the permalink - redirecting you.

Its a tricky one but here are some references if they help you:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1458724/how-do-i-set-unset-a-cookie-with-jquery

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/20475504/onclick-change-url-using-jquery

https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/89382/creating-custom-permalink-structure-for-languages

There is possibly a simpler option which is literally having two different website with the same domain - ( one being a subdomain )

Your main website is standard, then you create a subdomain e.g

nl.example.com

( you can create a subdomain with your domain/hosting provider )

And the link in the top corner just takes you to a clone of the website but with the different langauge:

https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/multilingual-wordpress-site-multisite/

This is how i would go about it, if you don't want a plugin - it is the simpler option.

If this seems to complicated a task, you may wish to seek the Aid of a developer as this is an interesting one - there is unfortunately a good reason so many of us rely upon language plugins instead of doing the work manually

I hope this helps & apologies that the answer isn't as simple as may have been hoped

Best wishes and let me know, Have a great day :)

Sincerely
Richard