Review Translator for WooCommerce

The Review Translator for WooCommerce plugin has a plethora of settings to make sure the plugin fits your site and requirements best. On this page we’ll go over each setting and explain how they work and how they affect your site.

The settings page can be found under WooCommerce > Settings > Products > Reviews.

Some of the settings will have effect to how often the translation service is called. This can directly affect how much you’re being charged by that service for the translation that is provided. This is why it is important to configure the plugin that fits your business needs. 

The plugin has been optimised to call the translation service as little as possible; for instance all translations are saved locally in your site’s database to prevent the service from being called multiple times for the same review (in the same language). 

Check the box when you’re ready to allow for users to translate the reviews they see. This will only work when the required API key is also available.

The plugin uses a translation service to translate the plugins. At the time of writing only Google Cloud Translation is used, in the future it is possible other services are added. 

In this field a Google API key need to be added. To learn how to get this you can read the documentation available here: Review Translator – Google Cloud Configuration

This setting determines if a review that is submitted should be run through the translation service to determine the origin language. This will affect whether a ‘Translate review’ link will be visible to the customer. In case the origin language is known and it is the same as the customer’s language, the link will not be shown. 

Note: detecting the language has the same cost as translating a review. This is why it is smart to consider translating a review to a common language by default (upcoming setting). When translating a review the origin language is also detected and provided and will be stored for this review. 

The Google Cloud Translation supports over 225 languages. If you’d like to limit the languages you’d like to allow reviews to be translated into it can be configured here. Leave this setting empty to allow for all (supported) languages. 

You can opt for automatically translating new reviews immediately when they’re posted. As mentioned with the language detection setting, this can be helpful and cost-saving as the origin language is also detected at the same time of a translation. 

If you have a scenario like Canada for example where it is common for English and French to be spoken through the country, you can add one, or both, of the languages in this setting. If the origin language of a review is French the translated English review will be stored locally. When French is setup as the second language to automatically review it will be skipped to save cost as it already knows it’s the same language. 
Note: if the review language is English and the first automated translation is also set to English it will try to translate it to English for the first time. This is because the plugin does not know (yet) the origin language.

This setting determines in what language the reviews should be displayed as by default. The default value for this is the ‘Origin language’, which is the original language the review was written in. 

‘Translated (when available)’ is the second option – this will show the translated version of the review when it’s already available locally. 

We’re considering adding an option here where it automatically translates all reviews through the translation service (that aren’t translated yet) to the language of the user (when allowed). Please get in touch if you’re interested in this functionality (seriously get in touch, we’d love to know!). 

The “Translate all reviews” is something that can be displayed at the top of the review section. By default it is not shown, so if you wish this to be available it will need to be manually enabled. There are two options available:

Only show previously translated reviews will only translate reviews that were previously translated. Reviews that aren’t translated to the language yet will remain in the original language. This option can be used to prevent bulk translation and the potential cost that can come with it.

Allow translation of all reviews on the page will translate all the reviews on the page. If it hasn’t been translated before it will go through the translation service and provide that freshly translated review.

The texts settings are there for a quick and easy way of changing the texts that are displayed on the front-end.