Weglot 2.0 on WordPress: what does this new version really change?

“It doesn’t break three legs to a duck.” Just a few years ago, that is more or less what a machine translation tool would have served you if you had asked it to translate the French idiom “Ça ne casse pas trois pattes à un canard” (which actually means “it’s nothing to write home about”).

A real comedy sketch. The duck (still on its two legs) is doing fine, and so is machine translation. They both thank you for asking.

With AI, these clumsy translations have (almost) disappeared. But the problem has shifted.

Today, the mistakes are more subtle: a casual tone where your brand is formal, a product name that gets translated when it should have stayed untouched. The text is correct, but it doesn’t sound like you.

This is exactly where Weglot wants to make a difference with Weglot 2.0, the new generation of its website translation solution.

AI translation tailored to your brand, a redesigned interface, image translation, connection to AI assistants via MCP, visibility in traditional and generative search engines: there are plenty of new features.

We took them apart and tested them to see what really changes. And to check whether, when it comes to translation, our duck is now safe from another linguistic misadventure!

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Transparency note: This article is sponsored by Weglot. Some links to the tool are affiliate links: if you sign up for a paid plan, WPMarmite earns a commission, at no extra cost to you. We remain impartial: when something deserves a caveat, we say so.

What is Weglot 2.0?

“A new generation of brand-faithful website translation, built specifically for multilingual websites.”

That is how Weglot describes its new baby, Weglot 2.0, which started rolling out on WordPress at the end of September 2026, before expanding to other platforms (JavaScript, Connect, Shopify, etc.) in the fourth quarter of 2026.

The goal is to direct all new users to Weglot 2 by the end of 2026, then gradually move existing users over in 2027.

Weglot is an all-in-one SaaS solution (software available online) that lets you make your WordPress site multilingual quickly and easily.

The French company, founded in 2016, claims to be used on more than 110,000 websites in over 110 languages. It logically chose WordPress, the most popular CMS in the world, to kick off the rollout of version 2.0.

After all, WordPress was the very first platform supported by Weglot, almost ten years ago.

“It’s a way to honor where we started while bringing a much more ambitious vision to the ecosystem that helped us grow”, explains Rémy Berda, Chief Product Officer and co-founder of Weglot.

Weglot 2.0: why change in the age of AI?

If you already use Weglot, you know the drill. If not, here is a quick reminder of how the tool works, in three sentences:

1. You install the dedicated WordPress plugin (Translate WordPress with Weglot) on your site.
2. The plugin detects your content, then translates it automatically with AI.
3. Finally, it displays it on dedicated URLs for each language (for example, mysite.com/fr/).

You can then find and edit your translations from the Weglot dashboard, or directly on the front end of your site (the part your visitors see).

Weglot 2.0 doesn’t overhaul this process. What is changing is rather the role of the solution, at a time when translating a text with ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini is within everyone’s reach.

Churning out English, Spanish or German versions of a French text is not enough to run a multilingual WordPress site efficiently. A business also needs to:

• preserve its terminology, tone and identity
• control what gets published
• sometimes manage thousands of translations
• make its new pages accessible to search engines.

To meet these challenges, Weglot 2.0 aims to combine the speed of AI with the control needed to manage a multilingual website.

Do everything by hand, or let AI translate blindly? Weglot poked fun at these two extremes in its “You Mean Weglot” campaign.

A rather quirky way of summing up the problem its version 2.0 sets out to solve, as you can see in the video below.

From machine translation to brand-faithful translation

This change is actually part of a broader path. Weglot describes its development in three main stages:

1. Removing the technical and operational barriers to translation.
2. Improving translation quality and trust in the result.
3. Helping businesses build, manage and grow their presence in different markets.

In other words, Weglot no longer just wants to translate your pages: it wants to help you publish, in every language, translations that are faithful to your brand and ready to be discovered.

This direction is confirmed by Augustin Prot, CEO and co-founder of Weglot. “AI has made translation faster and more accessible, but translating text is only one part of building a multilingual website,” he explains. “With Weglot 2.0, we wanted to rethink the whole experience around it: how businesses create translations that reflect their brand, how they review and publish them, and how they make sure that content can actually be discovered.”

In practice, this new approach rests on three pillars:

1. AI translations tailored to each brand’s identity.
2. A redesigned translation process, from generation to publication.
3. Making every translated page visible, in search engines as well as AI engines.

So the question is no longer just “How do I translate my site?” but “How do I publish, in every language, a site that looks like me and gets found?” Bottom line: Weglot mainly wants to go beyond translating text, toward managing the entire multilingual site.

Through this change of perspective, Weglot 2.0 lays the groundwork for translation that is more faithful to each brand, easier to manage and better equipped for multilingual visibility.

Throughout this article, we will focus on these new features. If you are completely new to the tool, check out our full review of Weglot on WordPress. It covers how it works, installation, pricing, pros and cons.

Weglot 1.0 vs Weglot 2.0: the main differences

Before we dive into the technical details, here is an at-a-glance look at the main changes introduced with Weglot 2.0 in the table below:

Heads-up: not everything in Weglot 2.0 is brand new! Before this new version, you could already create your own language model to generate machine translations that reflected your brand as closely as possible (with the Language Model update). However, it required more manual setup, and the results were less refined than what Weglot 2.0 offers.
What’s new is also the way these options are integrated into a redesigned user experience, along with new AI-powered building blocks.

Now that we have set the scene, it’s time to look at the first part of this version 2.0: an AI translation that is supposed to adopt the exact tone your brand uses.

AI translation that “speaks” like your brand

This is one of the major changes in Weglot 2.0: its AI Translation Model aims to go beyond a merely correct translation to better respect your brand identity.

Until now, Weglot relied in particular on neural translation technologies such as DeepL, Microsoft and Google Translate to automatically produce your first translations.

These translations could then be corrected manually and kept in check with a glossary.

With Weglot 2.0, this process gives way to the AI Translation Model: it combines cutting-edge AI models with your Brand Voice, your Translation Guidelines and the context of your site to produce brand-aligned translations right from the start.

How does the new AI Translation Model in Weglot 2.0 work?

The general idea? Rather than handing your text over to a generic machine translation engine, Weglot combines cutting-edge AI models with three sources of information specific to your business:

1. Brand Voice, which describes your brand’s identity and the way it communicates.
2. Translation Guidelines (labeled “Guidelines” in the interface), which set out your company’s rules and apply to all future translations.
3. The website context, so that each string is not treated as an isolated sentence.

“Instead of relying on generic prompts or heavy manual post-editing, businesses can start with translations that are more accurate, more consistent and better aligned with their brand identity, while keeping full control over reviewing and editing content before publication,” says the Weglot team.

The idea behind all this is fairly simple: two companies may want to translate the exact same sentence in two different ways.

A bank, a clothing brand for teenagers and a blog about WordPress don’t use the same vocabulary or the same tone.

A translation can therefore be grammatically flawless while sounding off compared with the rest of the site.

Weglot 2.0 aims to close this gap from the very first translation, with the option to define your Brand Voice and your Guidelines during onboarding.

Brand Voice and Translation Guidelines: what are they for?

The Brand Voice feature gives the AI context about your business and its personality.

To do this, Weglot asks you to fill in two key elements:

1. A description of what your brand does, and who it is for.
2. Its tone, with ten predefined adjectives to choose from (professional, straightforward, playful, innovative, friendly, etc.).

Translation Guidelines, on the other hand, go deeper into writing rules.

They let you steer the way translations are produced so they match your expectations, by adding guidelines.

For a site like WPMarmite, you could imagine guidelines on how to handle certain WordPress-specific terms (e.g. custom post types, plugins, sidebar, widgets, etc.).

For a WooCommerce online store, the rules could cover sales vocabulary, collection names, or the way product features are presented.

The benefit is obvious when hundreds of pages are involved: the closer the first draft is to the expected result, the fewer repetitive corrections you have to make.

Generic translation vs brand-aligned translation: our test

On paper, the promise is appealing. But does it really show in practice, in the results delivered by Weglot’s translation tool?

To find out, we ran a simple test: we submitted the same excerpt to Weglot with a generic translation, then with the information and guidelines related to our brand.

Original text

(taken from the French version of the WPMarmite article How to update the PHP version of your WordPress site):

Generic translation

“Speed and security—what do they rhyme with? Efficiency. Well done, +1. They also rhyme with… PHP!

To have a website with fast-loading pages that also offers a solid defense against hacker attacks, there’s a devilishly effective solution tied to the famous programming language.

Here’s the solution: update WordPress’s PHP version. Yep, it’s that simple. Well, sort of.

Even though the process isn’t very complex and doesn’t require any coding, there are several steps and rules to follow to avoid messing everything up.

If you’re interested, I’ll explain everything in this article. Once you’ve read it, you’ll have a step-by-step guide for changing your PHP version, if needed.

All without breaking a sweat—much to the delight of your future visitors. Come on, let’s embark on this adventure.”

Translation with Brand Voice

In our example, we looked at four elements:

• the tone used
• the vocabulary chosen
• compliance with WordPress terminology
• consistency with the editorial guidelines provided to Weglot.

As for the result, the customized version better preserves the conversational, friendly tone of the text, with phrases like “peace of mind?”, “Well played, +1” or “If you’re up for it”, which feel more natural in this register.

It also captures certain nuances better: “so you don’t break anything”, for example, more faithfully conveys the direct, informal feel of “ne pas tout casser” than a more neutral wording would.

WordPress terminology remains correct in both cases. So Brand Voice and Guidelines don’t radically transform the translation: they refine it, bringing the result closer to the expected editorial personality and potentially reducing the edits needed before publication.

Not convinced by the final result? Don’t panic! Translations remain accessible from the interface and can be reviewed and edited before publication, just like before version 2 arrived.

What’s more, thanks to exclusion rules, you can also exclude pages, blocks or terms from translation.

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A redesigned workflow to manage a multilingual site and your WordPress translations

Translating a site once: easy (or almost). Keeping it up to date in three languages, with a team, new content every week and reviews to approve: phew, that’s a whole other story.

This is the day-to-day routine that Weglot’s version 2 aims to lighten on your multilingual WordPress sites, by redesigning several parts of its interface.

A reworked dashboard and Translations list

To start with, on your WordPress site, a new minimalist, uncluttered dashboard makes it easier to manage your multilingual projects, with several links giving one-click access to core features (the translation list to edit translations, the language model, etc.):

The Translations list has also been revamped. This nerve center is where you access the detected content and its translations, and where you can edit them one by one:

With these two changes, the goal is to make navigation easier in a project with lots of content and several languages.

It may be less spectacular than the arrival of a new AI model, but it can become much more important as a site grows.

A smoother translation process

Weglot 2.0 also aims to streamline the path between translation, review and publication.

The Visual editor, which was already available before, is still part of the experience. It lets you edit a translation directly in the context of your site, which is handy for spotting wording that is too long for a button or doesn’t fit its location.

Agencies also get a centralized space to manage their clients’ workspaces.

And this new experience goes beyond text: Weglot 2 now also tackles the text hidden in your images.

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Image Translation: Weglot 2.0 also translates the text in your images

Promotional banners, infographics, screenshots, diagrams: the new Image Translation feature lets you translate the text embedded in a visual directly from Weglot, while trying to preserve its original design.

This is a major strategic move. Until now, translating an image-heavy WordPress site often meant stepping outside your usual process:

• grab the image
• edit its text in a design tool (or ask your designer to do it)
• export a new version, then assign it to the right language on your site.

Image translation used to be handled by Trame.ai. With Weglot 2.0, this technology is now built right into the Visual editor.

Real added value for image-heavy sites

The benefit becomes particularly clear for a business with dozens, or even hundreds, of visuals containing text.

An international online store, for example, may need to localize its sales banners, while a SaaS company will potentially have many screenshots of its interface to adapt.

In this kind of situation, Image Translation can remove a good share of the back-and-forth between Weglot, WordPress and a design tool. This is probably where the feature really comes into its own.

In this first version, translation is done image by image from the Visual editor, with a number of credits included per workspace. You can also keep the original image or upload your own translated version.

And Weglot doesn’t only care about the words visible in the image. Localization also covers alt tags, titles and SEO metadata attached to media, so the visual is treated as genuine multilingual content.

This new feature, particularly innovative within the WordPress ecosystem, brings Weglot closer to a more complete localization approach, starting with images.

After words and images, here comes a more unexpected new feature: managing your translations by chatting with an AI assistant.

Weglot MCP: manage your translations from an AI assistant

MCP is probably an acronym you have spotted in quite a few places lately. And for good reason: people are talking about it a lot, a lot, a lot these days.

But what exactly is it? MCP stands for Model Context Protocol. It is a standard that allows an AI assistant to connect to an external tool (a calendar, a database, a translation service) to read information and perform actions.

Weglot MCP applies this idea to your multilingual projects. According to the translation platform, this connector lets you link Weglot to your favorite AI assistant (e.g. ChatGPT) to “review translations, update content and manage a project in natural language” without going through the dashboard.

In practice, this approach can be useful if you are already used to working with an AI assistant in your daily routine.

If you want to learn more about this topic, check out Weglot’s documentation, which explains in detail how to connect the platform to AI assistants such as Claude, ChatGPT or Cursor.

On the other hand, if you are running a small two-language showcase site, you can easily do without it.

In the next section, let’s look at the third pillar of this Weglot 2.0: multilingual visibility.

SEO and GEO: technical foundations handled automatically

Translated pages designed for SEO and GEO

As Weglot puts it, “creating translated pages is only part of the challenge. They also need to be found by the audiences you are trying to reach.”

To meet this need, Weglot 2.0 automatically takes care of the technical foundations of multilingual SEO and GEO.

Among other things, the solution handles:

• creating dedicated URLs for each language
• implementing hreflang tags, which tell search engines about the different language versions of a page
• translating metadata
• publishing translated pages that are ready to be crawled and indexed.

Weglot also generates translated pages on the server side. Search engines can therefore access their content directly, rather than a translation displayed only in the visitor’s browser.

These mechanisms primarily serve multilingual SEO, which Weglot already handled before version 2.

But the company now also links them to GEO (Generative Engine Optimization), in other words the visibility of content in the answers produced by AI-powered engines and assistants (AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Mistral, etc.).

The logic remains similar: for content to stand out with an international audience, it has to exist in that audience’s language and be technically accessible to the systems likely to crawl and use it.

Be careful, though: this doesn’t mean Weglot can guarantee that a page will appear in an AI Overview or be cited by an AI assistant. Both SEO and GEO require many other signals, particularly related to the quality, relevance and authority of your content.

Ultimately, Weglot 2 mainly automates the multilingual technical groundwork, so that each language version has the right foundations to be discovered, whether through traditional or AI-powered search.

How does it impact visibility in AI engines?

To measure the value of a multilingual approach in generative search, Weglot analyzed 1.3 million citations from Google’s AI Overviews.

According to its study, sites offering translated content achieved up to 327% more visibility in AI Overviews compared with English-only sites.

An interesting result, but one that needs context: it doesn’t mean that using Weglot automatically boosts your visibility by 327%.

Above all, the study highlights the value of offering content in the user’s language to improve its chances of appearing in AI-powered search experiences.

Already using Weglot: what changes with Weglot 2.0?

Before wrapping up and recapping everything we’ve just covered, there is one important point left to address.

What does the transition to Weglot 2.0 look like, whether you’re an existing user or just getting started?

You are a Weglot V1 user

You know Weglot V1 inside out, and you already use it to translate your content with care?

Please note that the gradual migration of existing WordPress customers is planned for 2027. In the meantime, if you want to switch to Weglot 2.0, contact support: the Weglot team will handle the migration for you.

Their technical team will take care of the migration manually, simply because their official plugin cannot be updated from your WordPress dashboard.

You are a new user

Second scenario: you are discovering Weglot. For new users, Weglot 2.0 is now the default version (if you use a CMS other than WordPress, version 2.0 will be available very soon).

And the installation process is (almost) the same as for version 1:

• you create your Weglot account and complete the onboarding
• you copy your API key

• you install and activate the plugin in your WordPress back office
• then you connect the two tools (WordPress and Weglot) by entering your API key in the plugin settings.

And what about pricing?

Good news if you already use Weglot: migrating from Weglot 1 to Weglot 2 doesn’t change your price. You keep your current plan and your translations when you switch to the new version.

That doesn’t mean the pricing will stay frozen, though. Weglot is working on a new offer and new packaging, designed in particular to better reflect the features introduced with Weglot 2.0.

This new pricing model is due to launch after existing users have been migrated. At the time of writing, its prices and exact terms are not yet known.

Alright, this time, it’s time to take a step back and recap what we’ve covered.

What to take away from Weglot 2.0 on WordPress?

With Weglot 2.0, the French company isn’t trying to reinvent the core concept behind its WordPress plugin.

Above all, it wants to stay focused on brand-faithful translations, so you can publish with confidence and be discovered in every language.

This ambition translates into several major changes, with a new vision built around three pillars:

• Quality: AI translations built around your brand
• Coverage: translation that extends to text in images and to AI assistants
• Impact: multilingual sites ready for SEO and GEO from day one. All in a completely redesigned experience.

All in all, in our view, Weglot 2.0 is a logical evolution rather than a revolution. The foundations that made the tool successful (ease of use, no-code approach and built-in multilingual SEO) remain intact.

What’s really evolving is the philosophy behind it. At a time when any AI can translate a text in seconds, value is shifting toward quality, control and managing the entire multilingual experience including brand voice, workflow, images and visibility.

Weglot 2.0 thus lays the groundwork of its ambition to become a partner in businesses’ international growth.

Want to make up your own mind about this new version? Discover Weglot 2.0 on your WordPress site and test its features for yourself with an exclusive promo code (WPMARMITEXWEGLOT2), valid until February 28, 2027:

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WPMarmite Team

WPMarmite helps beginners get the best out of WordPress with in-depth tutorials and honest reviews. Meet the founder, Alex, and his team right here.