Recipe: Setting Up AI Translation Workflow

This recipe shows you how to translate an entire website efficiently using Lang Forge’s AI translation features. It covers credit planning, quality review, and best practices for getting the best results from automated translation.

Step 1: Estimate Your Credit Needs

Before translating anything, calculate how many credits you will need:

1. Go to Lang Forge > Analytics (or Lang Forge > Translation Status on PRO)
2. Note the total number of translatable posts and pages
3. Check the total word count across all content (shown in the Analytics dashboard)
4. Estimate credits: the plugin shows you per-action and total cost before starting, so you don’t have to pre-calculate manually
5. Multiply by the number of target languages to size your credit pack
6. Add 10 to 15 percent for custom fields, excerpts, and SEO metadata, which add to the word count per post
7. Compare the total with your current credit balance (Lang Forge > Account). If you need more, purchase add-on credit packs before starting — they never expire, so there’s no pressure to use them all at once

Step 2: Set Up the Glossary First

This is the single most important step for AI translation quality:

1. Go to Lang Forge > Glossary
2. Add your brand name and mark it as Do Not Translate
3. Add all product and service names with their correct translations in each target language
4. Add industry-specific terms with approved translations
5. Add abbreviations and acronyms with instructions (e.g., “SEO” marked as Do Not Translate, or “FAQ” with a translated expansion in each language)
6. If you have a corporate style guide with preferred terms, add those to the glossary as well
7. A glossary of 20 to 50 well-chosen terms dramatically improves AI translation consistency across your site

Step 3: Translate Strings First

1. Go to Lang Forge > String Translation
2. Select your first target language
3. Click AI Translate All to translate all theme and plugin strings in one batch
4. Review the translated strings. Common items to check:

– Button text (“Read More,” “Submit,” “Search”)

– Footer text

– Widget titles

– Error messages

1. Make corrections as needed. Corrected strings are stored in Translation Memory for future reference
2. Repeat for each target language

Step 4: Translate Core Pages First

Before running bulk translation, manually translate and review your most important pages:

1. Translate the Homepage into each language using the AI Translate button in the post editor or Visual Editor
2. Review each homepage translation carefully. The homepage sets the tone for the entire site
3. Translate the About page, Contact page, and any other high-visibility pages
4. These manually reviewed translations feed your Translation Memory, which improves the quality of bulk translations that follow

Step 5: Run Bulk AI Translation

1. Go to Lang Forge → Tools → One-Click Site Duplication
2. Pick the source language (your default) on the left and the first target language on the right
3. Click Duplicate + AI Translate
4. Review the confirmation panel that appears below:

– Estimated credit cost

– Your current credit balance

1. Click Proceed to start. The process runs in the background
2. You can leave the page or work on other tasks. Return to Lang Forge → Tools (the same One-Click Site Duplication card surfaces a live progress bar) or Lang Forge → Translation Status for the per-language overview
3. The bulk process uses Translation Memory automatically — any segments that match previously translated content reuse the stored translation instead of spending credits
4. Wait for the process to complete before starting the next language

Step 6: Quality Review Workflow

After bulk translation, follow this review process to ensure quality:

1. Filter the post list by the target language and Draft status to see all AI-translated drafts
2. Prioritize review by content importance:

– Medium priority: Blog posts with high traffic, category descriptions, about pages

– Low priority: Older blog posts, archive pages, less-visited content

1. For high-priority pages, open each one in the Visual Editor for side-by-side review. Check:

– Calls to action and marketing language (may need a more creative touch)

– Numbers, dates, and formatting (the AI usually handles these well, but verify)

– Links and URLs (should point to translated versions where applicable)

1. For medium-priority content, do a quick scan: read the title and first paragraph. If they read naturally, the rest is likely fine
2. For low-priority content, consider publishing without individual review if your glossary is comprehensive and the AI quality is generally high

Step 7: Using Translation Memory and Glossary Together

Translation Memory and the Glossary work as a powerful combination:

1. Glossary enforces consistency for specific terms: it ensures “CloudSync” is always left untranslated, “Enterprise Plan” always becomes “Plan Empresarial” in Spanish, and so on
2. Translation Memory learns from your past translations: when the AI encounters a sentence it has seen before (or one very similar), it reuses the stored human-reviewed translation instead of generating a new one
3. As you review and correct AI translations, those corrections automatically feed Translation Memory. Over time, the AI uses more and more of your reviewed translations, improving quality with each batch
4. Check your Translation Memory periodically at Lang Forge > Translation Memory. You can edit or delete stored pairs if you discover errors

Step 8: Bulk Operations Best Practices

Follow these guidelines to get the best results from bulk AI translation:

• Translate one language at a time. Complete the full cycle (translate, review, publish) for one language before starting the next. This keeps your workflow focused and ensures Translation Memory benefits each subsequent language
• Start with linguistically similar languages. If your default language is English, translate into Spanish or French before translating into Japanese or Arabic. Romance and Germanic languages tend to produce higher-quality AI translations from English, giving you confidence in the process
• Run bulk operations during off-peak hours. While the translation process runs in the background and does not affect site performance for visitors, your admin experience will be smoother with fewer concurrent server demands
• Keep your source content clean. Review your original-language content before translating. Fix typos, clarify ambiguous sentences, and standardize formatting. The AI translates what it reads — clean input produces clean output
• Use the Content Diff feature after bulk translation. If you update an original post after it has been AI-translated, the Content Diff will flag the translation as outdated. Use the “AI Update Translation” option to translate only the changed segments, preserving the rest

> Tip: After completing your first bulk translation, review 10 to 15 posts carefully and add any missed terms to the Glossary. Then re-run the AI translation for those posts. The second pass with an updated glossary produces noticeably better results.

> Good to know: The bulk AI translation process is resumable. If it is interrupted for any reason, running it again skips posts that already have translation drafts and processes only the remaining ones. No credits are wasted on previously translated content.

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