🎙️ Leo joined the WP Tavern podcast to talk about AI translations for WordPress
I (Leonardo Losoviz) joined Nathan Wrigley on the WP Tavern podcast, for episode #217 – "Affordable and Accurate WordPress Translations Using AI". 🎙️
We had a great conversation about something I care a lot about: making it genuinely easy — and cheap — to run a multilingual WordPress site, thanks to AI.
👉 Listen to the episode on WP Tavern
What we talked about
After more than a decade building plugins for WordPress, my more recent focus has been Gato AI Translations for Polylang — a plugin that uses AI to streamline translating a WordPress site. The episode dug into the ideas behind it:
- Why translate at all. There's both a moral case (making your content accessible to everyone, in their own language) and a very practical one (reaching audiences your competitors can't).
- From expensive to "literal cents". Translation used to mean hiring professional human translators at a steep cost. With AI, translating a post can now come down to a tiny fraction of that — just the cost of the tokens consumed.
- Accuracy is good enough — and getting better. In practice, the vast majority of AI translations come out accurate, to the point where you no longer need a full professional review of every sentence to ship with confidence.
- The Polylang approach. Rather than translating on the fly at request time, the plugin creates a separate post entry per language. That's better for performance, for SEO, and for letting you tweak each translation independently.
- SEO done right. We covered
hreflangtags and how to structure language-specific URLs — whether you go with subdomains or path-based prefixes. - Translate at the right moment. A simple checklist: finalize your content before translating, so you don't burn tokens re-translating drafts. Re-translate only when the source is settled.
- Images and media. Images are usually language-agnostic; what gets translated is the surrounding text, captions, and metadata.
- Where WordPress is heading. With features like collaborative editing on the horizon, there's a lot of room for AI and humans to work together right inside the editor.
Give it a listen
If you run a multilingual site — or you've been putting it off because translation felt too expensive or too much work — I think you'll enjoy this one.
🎧 Listen to episode #217 on WP Tavern
And if you want to try it yourself, check out Gato AI Translations for Polylang.
Thanks to Nathan and the WP Tavern team for having me! 🙏
