Polylang: Use AI to Translate WordPress Posts in Bulk

If you are a Polylang plugin user, you will be happy to know that, with WP Sheet Editor – AI, you can now bulk translate WordPress posts using generative AI.

Yes, the power of artificial inteligence has come to all WP Sheet Editor spreadsheets, allowing you to generate, edit and translate WordPress content in any post type and field, including custom fields added by third-party plugins.

As you know, managing a multilingual WordPress site is difficult. You need to spend a lot of time translating your content. And conventional translation services can be slow and very expensive.

But with the power of generative AI, you can completely simplify WordPress content translation tasks. And it’s even easier if you do it directly in an intuitive spreadsheet within the WordPress dashboard.

What you need to translate posts with AI

We assume that you already have the Polylang plugin installed to manage your WordPress content in multiple languages. In this tutorial, we will focus on the tools that will allow you to translate post content, post titles, excerpts, SEO data, and much more, using artificial intelligence in a spreadsheet.

Besides Polylang, you need these elements:

1- WP Sheet Editor – Post Types

This plugin lets you see and manage posts, pages, and custom post types in a spreadsheet on your WordPress dashboard. It has tools for searching, editing many items at once, and for exporting and importing data.

2- Extension: WP Sheet Editor — Polylang (Free)

This extension adds columns to edit the Polylang language and connect the translations on the spreadsheet.

3- WP Sheet Editor – AI

WP Sheet Editor – AI is a tool that connects with your favorite AI services and adds AI features to every WP Sheet Editor spreadsheet. With just a few clicks, you can create and edit WordPress content in bulk.

4- External API provider

The AI features in WP Sheet Editor use an external service like OpenAI or OpenRouter. You’ll need an account with the provider and an API key to connect.

WP Sheet Editor – AI is compatible with these AI providers:

• Open AI for text and images (more info here)
• OpenRouter (more info here)
• Any other provider and model that uses the same format as OpenAI.

Follow this guide to learn how to set up AI providers in WP Sheet Editor – AI.

Open the WordPress posts spreadsheet

As we have indicated, WP Sheet Editor allows you to view and manage posts, pages, and custom post types in spreadsheets within WordPress.

But in this tutorial we will focus on translating posts with AI, although you could apply these steps to pages and other custom post types.

To open the WordPress posts spreadsheet, you need to go to WP Sheet Editor > Edit posts.

You’ll notice that the spreadsheet displays posts depending on the Polylang language you select in the admin bar. For example, here you can see our English posts.

And here you can see the translations of our posts in Spanish:

However, although we have created the entries for the translations, we have not yet translated the titles, content, excerpts and other fields. We have only created the entries, not translated them.

How to create Polylang translations

The process to create the entries that belong to the translations of our WordPress posts consists of these steps:

1. Export the original posts to a CSV file.
2. Remove the “record_id” columna from the CSV.
3. Replace the main language with a translation/secondary language in the “Polylang – Language” column.
4. Link each translation to the original post it belongs to by copying the original post’s title into the “Polylang – Translation of” column.
5. Import the translated posts as new entries.

We have already done it, but if you haven’t done it yet, you should follow this tutorial.

Once you have uploaded the translation entries to your WordPress site, you’re ready to start translating your WordPress posts with AI.

Translate WordPress posts with AI for Polylang

Let’s see some options you have to translate the fields of your WordPress posts using artificial intelligence.

Option 1 – Using global prompts in the cells

WP Sheet Editor – AI allows you to create a bank of prompts that you can reuse in different areas of WP Sheet Editor (spreadsheet cells, bulk editor, new rows generation, etc.).

To create global prompts, you need to go to WP Sheet Editor > AI > Settings > Prompts.

Once there, you need to click on Add New.

Now you need to:

• Add the prompt’s Name. In this example, we will create a global prompt for translating post titles, so we will name this prompt “Translate title”
• Add the prompt’s text in the Prompt field. We will use this prompt field:

Translate into Spanish. Return only the translation, preserving the original case sensitivity.

• Save the prompt.

Once you save your global prompt, it will automatically generate a prompt slug, which you’ll be able to use in spreadsheet cells, bulk edit and other instances, using the ai:prompt-name shortcut.

For example, if your prompt slug is translate-title, you need togo to WP Sheet Editor > Edit posts and use the ai:translate-title shortcut in spreadsheet cells.

The AI will start processing the request, so you’ll see a loading icon in the cell:

And when the task is complete, you’ll see the translated data in the cells:

You can paste the same prompt shortcut in multiple cells to translate multiple cells at once:

And within some seconds, your data will be translated into the selected language, so if you’re done translating, you need to Save the changes.

Important: This is just an example of how to translate the titles of your posts, but you can translate data in any column of the spreadsheet:

• Title
• Content
• Excerpt
• SEO Title
• SEO Description
• SEO Keyword
• Social media SEO
• Or any custom field added with third party plugins

Option 2 – Using full prompts in the cells

In addition to being able to use global prompts easily in spreadsheet cells, WP Sheet Editor – AI allows you to use full prompts in cells.

To do this, just type ai: and add the full prompt.

For example, we can add this prompt:

ai: Translate into Spanish. Return only the translation, preserving the original case sensitivity.

Once the task is complete, you’ll see your translated post title in the spreadsheet.

You can paste full prompts in multiple cells to translate in bulk using AI.

Once you’re done translating, you need to Save changes.

Important: This is just an example of how to translate the titles of your posts, but you can translate data in any column of the spreadsheet:

• Title
• Content
• Excerpt
• SEO Title
• SEO Description
• SEO Keyword
• Social media SEO
• Or any custom field added with third party plugins

Option 3 – Bulk translate posts

Besides translating in the spreadsheet cells, you can bulk translate WordPress posts with AI.

WP Sheet Editor’s Bulk AI API: When you run multiple AI tasks at the same time, WP Sheet Editor – AI uses a special server to handle them all together. This makes the process much faster. For instance, if doing 10 tasks one after another takes 60 seconds, using this server can complete them in just 6 seconds. You can read more about our Bulk AI API here.

To do this, you need to open the Bulk Edit tool.

The Bulk Edit tool allows you to bulk translate posts using both global prompts and custom prompts.

a) Using global prompts

Select these values if you want to bulk translate the content of a specific field using a pre-saved global prompt:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows)
  • Optionally, you can edit all the manually selected rows or open the search tool and edit all the search results.
• What field do you want to edit: Title
  • This is just an example of how to translate the titles of your posts, but you can translate data in any column of the spreadsheet:
    • Title
    • Content
    • Excerpt
    • SEO Title
    • SEO Description
    • SEO Keyword
    • Social media SEO
    • Or any custom field added with third party plugins
• Select type of edit: Here you need to select the pre-saved AI prompt. In this case, since our global prompt for translating post titles is “Translate title”, the tool displays that option as “AI command: Translate title”. It will list all the pre-saved global prompts.
• AI Provider: If you have set up multiple AI providers and models, you can select the one you want to use in order to complete this task.
• You can click on the Show preview button to preview the result before applying this bulk edit.
• Once you’re sure and have selected the values, click on Execute Now.

b) Using full prompts

Select these values if you want to bulk translate the content of a specific field using a full prompt in the Bulk Edit tool:

• Select the rows that you want to update: Edit all the rows from my current search (including non-visible rows)
  • Optionally, you can edit all the manually selected rows or open the search tool and edit all the search results.
• What field do you want to edit: Title
  • This is just an example of how to translate the titles of your posts, but you can translate data in any column of the spreadsheet:
    • Title
    • Content
    • Excerpt
    • SEO Title
    • SEO Description
    • SEO Keyword
    • Social media SEO
    • Or any custom field added with third party plugins
• Select type of edit: AI Prompt
• AI Provider: If you have set up multiple AI providers and models, you can select the one you want to use in order to complete this task.
• Prompt: Enter the prompt here. In this example, we will use this prompt that you can customize and use:

  Translate the $current_value$ into Spanish. Return only the translation, preserving the original case sensitivity.

• You can click on the Show preview button to preview the result before applying this bulk edit.
• Once you’re sure and have selected the values, click on Execute Now.

WP Sheet Editor – AI is the perfect AI translation solution for Polylang. And the best part is that it’s not limited to translation; you can use it for content generation and content optimization. Get the best of your WordPress multilingual site with WP Sheet Editor – AI.