The French start-up Weglot obtained this year a round of financing from Serie A of 50 million dollars Partech. The company has created a website translation solution that helps add more languages to a site without much tweaking and without having to switch to a CMS or e-commerce platform.
Translation plugins for WordPress from Shopify or others have been around for a while. But Weglot wants to create a universal product that works for all types of web experiences.
There are two ways to take advantage Weglot. It can be added to an existing website with a plugin (plugin, addon,…) with WordPress, Shopify, Wix and WooCommerce. If you are a small business and there is no dedicated web developer, it can be installed without writing a line of code.
The other way is that you can add a little Javascript code to the website. Weglot use this approach for Webflow, Squarespace, and BigCommerce. You also have to modify the DNS records to create subdomains or subdirectories for new languages.
on the servers of Weglot, the company automatically detects and extracts the content of the site. Weglot customers can use machine translation to get started with new languages.
The company also offers a dashboard so you can dig into your content and create better translations. You can give access to professional translators and manage translations from that interface.
After performing those actions, you already have a multilingual site. Whenever a visitor visits the web, it will load in their favorite language by default. A language switcher can also be added to the corner of the website if you want to offer multiple options.
Although the translations are stored on the servers of Weglot, dedicated subdirectories or subdomains are created for each language. In this way, Google and other search engines can index each language variant of your website. Metadata and keywords can also be translated with Weglot.
The startup charges a monthly subscription depending on the number of languages and words you need. Last year, Weglot hit $11 million in annual recurring revenue, which is not bad for a startup that hasn't raised outside capital since its seed round in 2017.
