Building a large website typically means that you're serving visitors for many countries. To offer a better experience, many sites offer country/language specific versions to visitors. In this post, we're going to take a look at the best translation plugins for the Oxygen Builder - which is a unique situation in that the builder disables all themes. That means that some of the most popular translation solutions won't work well with Oxygen Builder (which we'll make note of throughout this article).

First, let's take a look at a recent community poll of "what the best translation plugin is for Oxygen Builder" is:

Polylang comes in first, then TranslatePress, WPML and finally WeGlot. For this article, we'll also add in our own plugin recommendation; GTranslate.

Let's take a quick look into what Oxygen officially says, when asked if it works with Translation plugins:

Now, let's get into the list.

PolyLang

PolyLang is the community recommendation, and it works well with Oxygen Builder. We've used it on several websites without any issues.

With PolyLang, you can create a custom condition for Oxygen Builder (tutorial here). Then, simply select "PolyLang" and choose the language. This will only show the element if the condition matches - for example, if the user selects "EN", Oxygen will only render elements that have the condition of Polylang > EN applied to it.

Another option would be using translation strings, something we haven't had to do, but it should work well:

You can also go into Polylang settings and have it apply to complete Oxygen templates (choosing the custom post type). Then, you can make a standard template, Spanish template, German template and more. It's a very robust solution.

TranslatePress

We've been using TranslatePress on the majority of our multilingual websites without issue for some time now. It works well by incorporating Oxygen conditions and the PHP function return value, which has been built into TranslatePress for some time.

Essentially, if you add the custom PHP condition of get_locale > de_DE (find locales here), if the visitor is located in Germany, the element will show. You can wrap entire pages in a conditional div, and only show based on the local that TranslatePress is set to. Quick, easy and simple.

From the Facebook group:

Additionally, you can use the standard frontend editor with an Oxygen Builder website. Simply initialize it, point on the text you want to translate, and do just that:

Read the entire official article on how to use TranslatePress and Oxygen Builder here.

GTranslate

GTranslate and GTranslate pro are very good plugins that automate a lot of the the translation process. This is our suggestion as we've had a good experience using it (pro version) with Oxygen. However, you'll want to add it after the site is built as it will interfere with the Oxygen Builder editor.

You can also unload it using a plugin like Freesoul Deactivate Plugins.

However, because everything is pretty hands off and automated, the pricing is less like a WordPress plugin and more like a SaaS offering.

Weglot

WeGlot is a web translation service with deep support for WordPress websites. It's highly rated and uses machine translation, meaning that you can cover many languages quickly and easily. It's a bit different from other plugins in that it's a service intended to sit on top of any site (WordPress or otherwise), meaning that it's globally compatible and works really well with Oxygen.

This is actually the suggested solution by the founder (and lead dev) of Oxygen Builder, Louis Reingold.

WPML

WPML works (use this custom condition), but based on what we've seen in the Facebook, it's really difficult to use. Essentially, it's just not worth the effort, and should be the absolute worst case scenario when it comes to translating a WordPress Oxygen Builder website.

WPML is the most popular plugin, but it's a bit outdated and in our opinion there are much better

Refer to this Github for more info in integration, and what works/what doesn't.

The Best Translation Solution?

We really like TranslatePress. It works well for us and we haven't had any trouble. There's also adequate, Oxygen-specific, public documentation and great support from the developers.

Polylang and Polylang Pro are the community favorites. We've used it a few times, but prefer TranslatePress.

Weglot is the suggested solution by the founder (and lead dev) of Oxygen Builder, Louis Reingold.