Polylang: Bulk Translate WooCommerce Products in Google Sheets

Do you have hundreds of WooCommerce products in your store and want to translate them quickly to create a multilingual WooCommerce store using Polylang?

We are sure that translating product names, descriptions and short descriptions will take you many hours if you edit product by product manually.

So, in this tutorial, we will show you how to translate WooCommerce products in bulk using Google Sheets and Polylang.

This way, you can easily create Polylang product translations and quickly import them into your WordPress site.

Here’s what you need

To create a multilingual WooCommerce store, you need these plugins:

• WooCommerce
• Polylang
• Polylang for WooCommerce

We assume you’re already using these plugins.

Besides these plugins, you need these other plugins / extensions / services:

WP Sheet Editor – WooCommerce Products plugin

This plugin allows you to view and manage your WooCommerce products in a spreadsheet on the WordPress admin dashboard.

If you want to increase your productivity in creating and managing multilingual WooCommerce stores with Polylang, WP Sheet Editor is your best choice because it contains tools that can help you save hundreds of hours of work.

WP Sheet Editor – Polylang extension

This extension adds full compatibility between WP Sheet Editor and Polylang, allowing you to edit Polylang fields as columns in the spreadsheet.

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Google Sheets Sync service

The Google Sheets Sync service allows you to export and import WordPress content using Google Sheets.

You can export and import immediately, as well as create scheduled exports and imports (one-time, in real time, recurring).

After installing what you need to translate WooCommerce products in Google Sheets, follow the steps below.

Step 1. Connect WordPress and Google Sheets

When you sign up to the Google Sheets Sync service, you’ll get a helper plugin that will allow you to connect your WordPress site to your Google Sheets account, to the Google API, and to the WP Sheet Editor API.

Follow this guide to do it.

Step 2. Export your WooCommerce products to Google Sheets

The spreadsheet displays the products according to the Polylang language you select in the admin bar.

For example, if you select the English language, the products will be in English.

And if you select the Spanish language, the products will be in Spanish.

Note – Since we haven’t translated any products into Spanish, the spreadsheet shows no products. But we’ll translate our products from English into Spanish.

To do this, the first thing we need to do is export our WooCommerce products to Google Sheets. Let’s start by opening the Export tool.

Now let’s select these values in the Export tool:

• What columns do you want to export: We are going to export all columns, except these columns:
  • ID
  • Date
  • Date modified
  • URL slug
  • View
  • WP Editor
• Which rows do you want to export: We will export all the rows from the current search (all the products).
• What app will you use to edit this file: Google Sheets
• Name of this export (optional): Add a name here, and this will be the name assigned to your Google Sheet.
• Click on Start new export.

Once the export process is complete, you need to click the “View Google Sheet” link to open the file.

As you can see below, we have exported all our WooCommerce products to Google Sheets.

Step 3. Translate WooCommerce products in Google Sheets

To translate our WooCommerce products in Google Sheets (create Polylang translations in bulk), we are going to use the =GOOGLETRANSLATE function.

You just need to follow these steps:

1- Sort the columns.

Make sure to reorder the columns in the Google Spreadsheet so that you can work in a more organized way.

You should put these columns together:

• Name
• Description
• Short description
• Polylang: Translation of
• Polylang: Language.

2- Remove the “record_id” column.

By default, we export the record_id column, but in this case you will not need it, so you can remove it.

3- Add translation columns.

These are the columns we are going to translate:

• Name
• Description
• Short description

Therefore, we are going to add a column for each field we are going to translate. In this case, we are going to add these columns:

• Name ES
• Description ES
• Short description ES

If you want to translate any other field, make sure you add a column for the translated content.

Important: You don’t need to translate taxonomy columns like Categories, Tags, or Attributes because, if you do, the product translations won’t be properly connected to their source products. Instead, you can follow this tutorial if you want to translate any WooCommerce taxonomy in bulk.

4- Copy the values from the “Name” column to the “Polylang: Translation of” column.

This is important to connect translations with source products.

5- Edit the values in the “Polylang: Language” column.

Replace the source language (English = en) with the target language (Spanish = es).

6- Translate the product titles.

To translate the product names, add the following Google function to the cells where you want to create the translations:

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(cell,"source language code","target language code")

For example, if the name column is the AP column in the Google spreadsheet, and you want to translate the second row from English (source language) to Spanish (target language), you should enter this in the second row of the “Name ES” column:

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(AP2,"en","es")

It should look like this:

As you can see, we have translated the first product name.

To translate all the other products, just autofill the cells below, and the other product names will be translated.

7- Translate the product descriptions.

You need to do the same you did in the Name column, so just add the Google Translate function:

As you see, we have autofilled the cells below and the product descriptions have been translated:

8- Translate the product short descriptions.

Again, you need to do the same you did in the Name and Description columns, so just add the Google Translate function:

As you see, we have autofilled the cells below and the product short descriptions have been translated:

We have successfully translated all our product names, descriptions and short descriptions in Google Sheets. Now we’re ready to import the Polylang translations from Google Sheets to WordPress.

Step 4. Import Polylang translations from Google Sheets

After translating the WooCommerce products in Google Sheets, you need to follow the steps below in order to import the Polylang translations:

1- Open the spreadsheet in the target language.

In this case, we will select the Spanish language.

2- Open the “Import” tool.

3- Select the Google Sheet you will import into WordPress by selecting these values:

• Source: Google Sheets
• Google Sheet file: Select the Google spreadsheet where you translated the WooCommerce products. You can refresh the list if you don’t find the Google Sheet.
• Click on Next.

4- Manually map the columns to import.

In this case, you need to ignore these columns:

• Name (source language) = Ignore this column
• Description(source language) = Ignore this column
• Short description (source language) = Ignore this column

Instead, you have to map these columns:

• Name ES (target language) = Name
• Description ES (target language) = Description
• Short description ES (target language) = Short description

Once you’re done mapping the columns, click on Next.

5- We will select “Import all rows as new” and click on “Next”.

6- Finally, you’ll see a preview. If everything is OK, you need to click on “The preview is fine, start import”.

As you can see below, we have created 50 items, which means we have imported 50 product translations.

This is what our translated WooCommerce products look like in the spreadsheet.

We can check the Polylang fields to make sure the new products are translations.

You can bulk translate thousands of WooCommerce products in Google Sheets. This will boost your productivity because you’ll be able to manage your Polylang multilingual website easily.