PolyTrans
WordPress translation plugin for seamless multilingual content management
PolyTrans was born out of frustration with the translation plugin market. Existing solutions like WPML, Weglot, or TranslatePress charge $200–800+/year in license and translation fees — and with services like Weglot, you lose all your translations if you stop paying. For a content-heavy platform like trans.info operating in 10+ languages, those costs add up fast.
Instead of paying for yet another SaaS subscription, PolyTrans takes a different approach: bring your own AI account. The plugin connects to any AI provider you already use — you pay only for the tokens you actually consume, not a flat monthly fee. This makes it dramatically cheaper to operate at scale.
Built for trans.info and the Trans.eu ecosystem, PolyTrans powers content management across 10+ European languages with seamless cross-language linking and content synchronization.
Trans.info needed to serve content in 10+ European languages. The existing WordPress translation plugins all came with the same problem: expensive monthly subscriptions that scale with content volume, not actual translation needs.
Key Challenges:
- →Translation plugins cost $200–800+/year in license fees, and some lock your translations behind ongoing payments
- →Managing 10+ languages without content duplication chaos
- →Maintaining cross-language content relationships and links
- →Need for intuitive language switching for editors and users
- →Integration with existing Trans.eu infrastructure
PolyTrans is a translation orchestration system — it doesn't translate content itself, but coordinates the entire pipeline: from sending posts to AI providers, through post-processing workflows, to delivering polished translations back into WordPress. All within the familiar admin interface.
Core Features:
- ✓Pluggable AI provider registry — Google Translate, OpenAI, Claude, Gemini — switch or combine as needed
- ✓Post-processing workflows: multi-step AI chains that run after translation (status updates, date localization, meta fields, content cleanup)
- ✓Multi-server architecture: separate sender, translator, and receiver roles for distributed processing
- ✓Tag and taxonomy translation management with CSV import/export
- ✓Review workflow with email notifications and status tracking (started → translating → processing → completed)
- ✓Cross-language content linking and seamless frontend language switcher
Core Platform
Built as a WordPress plugin with a modular architecture — provider registry, workflow engine, and server roles are all decoupled and configurable.
AI Provider Integration
Pluggable provider registry — each AI service implements a common interface, making it trivial to add new providers or switch between them per language pair.
Orchestration
Multi-server architecture with sender/translator/receiver roles communicating via REST. Post-processing workflows run as chained AI steps after initial translation.
Deployment
Deployed across Trans.eu infrastructure powering trans.info and related platforms.
Bring Your Own AI
Instead of locking you into a single translation provider, PolyTrans lets you connect any AI account you already have. Google Translate for bulk work, Claude for nuanced editorial content, OpenAI for specific language pairs — mix and match as needed.
Post-Processing Workflows
Raw translation is just the first step. PolyTrans runs configurable multi-step AI chains after the initial translation — localizing dates, updating status fields, adjusting meta content, and cleaning up formatting automatically.
Multi-Server Architecture
Designed for scale: separate WordPress instances can act as sender, translator, or receiver. The main site sends content, a dedicated translation server processes it, and language-specific sites receive the results — all coordinated via REST API.
Tag & Taxonomy Management
Bulk translation management for tags and taxonomies with CSV import/export. Map tags across languages without manually editing each one.
Multilingual Reach
Orchestrates content translation across 10+ European languages on trans.info, coordinating AI providers and post-processing workflows for each language pair.
Cost Efficiency
Eliminated $200–800+/year in plugin license fees. Actual cost is just the AI tokens consumed — a fraction of what subscription-based translation services charge.
Production Ready
Running in production on trans.info with multi-server deployment, handling daily translation workloads across the Trans.eu platform ecosystem.
Source Code
Available on GitLab for the community