Who Can Translate Your WPML Site – AI, Yourself, Your Translators, or Professional Services

The four channels match the methods you pick in Step 2 of the Translation Dashboard’s send flow.

Translate Yourself

For one-off translations or content you want to write in the target language by hand, pick Translate myself in the Dashboard. WPML opens the entry in the Advanced Translation Editor, where you translate side-by-side with the source.

Translate With WPML’s AI

For most sites, the cheapest, fastest path is letting WPML translate automatically. Pick Translate Automatically in the Dashboard. Or just leave Translate Everything Automatically on and WPML translates your whole site for you in the background.

We recommend PTC as the AI engine. It’s the default after the Setup Wizard, and the only engine that preserves your edits. When you correct a translation, PTC remembers and applies the same correction next time. See PTC – WPML’s AI translation for the engine in depth, and PTC vs DeepL for the measured quality comparison against the strongest mainstream alternative.

DeepL, Google, and Microsoft remain available as legacy engines. They translate, but they don’t learn from your edits and they don’t apply your glossary.

When AI Translations Need Review

PTC translates with full-page context and learns from your edits, so most PTC translations are ready to publish without review. You publish a page in one language and visitors see the translated version in theirs.

The legacy engines translate one segment at a time, without site-level context and without learning from your edits. Their translations are worth reviewing before they go live, so you can catch the cases where a segment misses the meaning or tone of the source.

When you do find something to fix on any engine, the procedure is the same: open the page in the Advanced Translation Editor and edit the segment. The full how-to is on How to edit a WPML automatic translation.

Translate With Your Own Translators

If you have people on your team who translate (staff who speak both languages, freelancers you work with regularly, anyone you trust to translate your content), add them as Translators on your site. Each translator gets the language pairs they handle.

If you’re an agency building sites for clients, this same role assignment works for handing translation editing to your client. PTC translates, your client edits anything they want differently, and you stop being the middleware. See Let your clients edit their own translations for the full agency workflow.

From the Dashboard, pick Assign a translator to send content to a specific person. They see the work in their Translation Tasks tab when they log in.

Translators work in one of two editors:

• Inside WPML’s Advanced Translation Editor. The default. Translators click Translate on a task and translate side-by-side in the browser.
• In their own CAT tool. Translators using memoQ, Trados, OmegaT, or another tool can export tasks as XLIFF, translate locally, and import the translated XLIFF back. See For translators for the full workflow.

Admins set translators up at WPML > Settings > Translators. The same screen also configures Translation Managers, the role that oversees translators and assigns jobs. All administrators are automatically Translation Managers; in larger teams, an admin can add dedicated Translation Managers to delegate without granting full admin privileges.

The full reference for what a translator sees and does is in For translators – how to translate with WPML.

Translate With a Professional Translation Service

When you want translations done by a vetted external service (a translation agency, a localisation platform, a marketplace of translators), connect a service in WPML and assign translation jobs to it directly.

The four-step service flow:

1. Connect

   Open Manage Translators & Services, pick a service from the list, authenticate. WPML supports 70+ services. Administrators can pre-select a single service so the dropdown shows only that one provider, which is useful for agencies standardising on one translation service across clients.

2. Hide languages in progress (optional)

   Hide a language from the front-end while the service is translating, so visitors don’t see half-translated content.

3. Send

   From the Dashboard, pick Assign a translation service and click Translate. WPML hands the job to the connected service.

4. Receive

   Completed translations come back automatically (when Translation pickup mode is on) or by manual download.

Two related resources stay at their current URLs:

• The Translation Services Directory – 70+ professional services that integrate with WPML, with reviews and ratings.
• Translation Management Systems integrated with WPML – TMS platforms (Crowdin, Lokalise, GlobalLink, and others) that connect to WPML for enterprise translation workflows.