wpLingua’s “Private Language” feature lets you manage your machine translations with complete peace of mind, before making them available to your visitors.
What is the purpose of the private language?
By default, when a new language is added to your site via wpLingua, it is immediately visible to all Internet users. However, it can be useful to temporarily disable the public display of a language while you work on its translations. This is exactly what the private language mode allows you to do.
Use case 1: proofreading and correcting translations
When you activate a new language in private mode, wpLingua can automatically generate the translations, but they will only be visible to site administrators. This allows you to :
- Review and correct automatically generated translations.
- Translate certain elements manually if necessary.
- Test the interface in the new language without impacting the user experience.
This is particularly useful for guaranteeing the quality of translated content before publication.
Use case 2: improving performance on high-traffic sites
When a page is first consulted in a new language, wpLingua dynamically generates the translation and stores the strings in the database. On high-traffic websites or with sites with very long pages, this can cause a slight delay for the user.
By generating translations upstream, in private language mode, you avoid this delay:
- Translations are ready and cached before they go online.
- When the language is publicly activated, pages are immediately displayed in the target language, with no latency.
How do I activate a language in private mode?
- Go to the WordPress dashboard to the wpLingua General Settings tab.
- Click on “Edit” for your translation language.
- Activate the “Make this language private” option.
- Save your changes.
Once your translations are ready, you can make the language public by clicking and unchecking this option.
Who can see a private language?
Only admin users logged into the WordPress dashboard can view and navigate the site in a private language. Visitors who are not logged in will only see publicly activated languages.
Another tip to know
As you can see, the private language is particularly useful for content already online, to avoid incomplete or incorrect translations being visible to visitors.
On the other hand, if you regularly publish new articles or pages, you don’t need to activate this option: simply visit the publication preview in the translated languages to pre-generate them even before the original content is published.
So the moment you publish your article (or page), the translations are already ready and will be visible instantly in the activated languages, with no latency and no content waiting to be translated.
This guarantees a smooth multilingual experience from the moment your content goes online.
