This episode of the Jukebox podcast (WP Tavern) features Leonardo Losoviz, a long‑time WordPress plugin author behind Gato GraphQL and Gato AI Translations for Polylang. Leo joined Nathan Wrigley after his WordCamp Asia talk, “The Invisible Gotchas of WP Translation,” to explain how AI is changing multilingual sites and to share practical advice for site owners and developers.
Why translate at all?
Leo separates two obvious cases: legal obligations and opportunity. If you’re compelled by law to provide content in another language, you must do it. If you aren’t required, translating still makes sense: it enlarges your audience and can drive more visitors. With AI making translation cheap and fast, the cost/benefit calculus has shifted—if your potential audience speaks other languages, it’s usually worth translating.
How AI changes the equation
AI models now produce very high quality translations for most general content. That means the heavy lift of paying human translators for full translations is often no longer necessary. Instead, humans are best used to review edge cases: technical jargon, industry‑specific terminology, ambiguous phrases, or legal copy where absolute precision matters. The cost model is now token‑based (fractions of a dollar per translation), so you can translate into many more languages for very little money and only spend on human review where it’s needed.
Gato AI Translations + Polylang: workflow details
Leo’s Gato AI Translations plugin integrates with Polylang. Key points about how this approach works:
– Polylang creates separate posts for each language (one English post produces a French post, a Spanish post, etc.). That static approach helps caching, static exports, and performance compared with translating strings at runtime.
– Gato enables bulk translation from the posts list: select a post, choose “translate,” and the plugin will duplicate and translate content to the target languages you’ve configured.
– Media and taxonomy translations: Polylang keeps language metadata for categories, tags, and media attachments. Media files aren’t duplicated on disk; translations create separate attachment entries with translated titles/captions but reference the same physical file.
– URLs and SEO: Polylang lets you serve languages via language codes (site.com/fr/slug) or subdomains (fr.site.com). It also outputs hreflang relationships so search engines understand which pages are translations of each other.
User interface and future WordPress features
Currently Leo’s plugin handles translation without interactive AI prompts—translation returns a completed string which you insert into the translated post and then edit in WordPress as needed. Looking ahead, WordPress 7.0 introduces two relevant pieces:
– An AI Connector API that opens standardized access to AI services from within WordPress.
– Collaborative editing (phase three of Gutenberg), bringing comments and chat‑like interactions inside the editor.
Together these could let AIs flag uncertain translations, add sticky comments, or participate in editor conversations—so a translation could be automatically created and then annotated with AI suggestions that a human reviewer can accept or correct.
Practical checklist and tips
Leo emphasizes not translating unfinished posts. Every translation run costs tokens (and creates work if you must retranslate). Before translating, validate your source content: fix typos, set correct headings, ensure images have proper alt text, and confirm any embedded media is appropriate for the target audience. He keeps a pre‑translation checklist to avoid wasted effort.
Handling images and non‑text content
Technically AI can extract text from images and regenerate localized versions, but Leo advises caution. Doubling or tripling image assets for each language quickly becomes unmanageable. Prefer language‑agnostic images or use overlay text elements that are translated as normal text. Polylang already stores translated captions and metadata without duplicating the image file itself.
Performance and architecture choices
There are two common strategies among multilingual plugins: create separate posts for each language (Polylang approach) or store one post and translate strings at runtime (some other plugins). Static duplicate posts are often better for caching and scale because they avoid runtime string lookups and expensive translation calls on each request.
The competitive landscape: an arms race
A major observation: because AI makes translation cheap and easy, everyone can do it. Early adopters once gained a big advantage, but as adoption becomes widespread, translating becomes a baseline expectation rather than a unique differentiator. That may still be reason enough to translate—to avoid falling behind competitors.
Final thoughts
AI has dramatically lowered the barriers to multilingual WordPress sites: faster, cheaper translations with quality sufficient for most content. The best pattern now is to automate the bulk translation with AI, use human reviewers for critical or technical content, finalize source posts before translation, and choose a plugin/architecture (like Polylang’s separate posts) that suits your caching and SEO needs. Emerging WordPress features—AI connectors and collaborative editing—promise tighter AI/human workflows inside the editor, making translation and review even smoother.
To hear the full conversation and see Leo’s WordCamp Asia talk, look for the Jukebox episode on wptavern.com/podcast or search WP Tavern in your podcast app.