I am being asked to create a three language website. The first one will be in English and then we will translate it into French and Spanish. We have French and Spanish speakers that work for the company so they will be able to provide the translations (we don't want to rely on anything automated as they often are not very good).

Can anyone recommend a decent plugin for this?

A plugin for the translation or a plugin to manage the language switching?

We will write the translations between us. We don't want it automated. SEO is also an important consideration here

Ok, got that. Why do you need a plugin?

No plugin required, but for SEO have a read of Use hreflang for language and regional URLs by Ze'Googles.

To manage the switching, whilst considering the SEO aspects, and to make it easy for future updates too. Just figured that there was probably a decent one out there. 

Would you recommend another method? I have heard things about making duplicate sites in different languages but have no experience with that. Any feedback or advice welcome.

Thanks!

Edited June 18, 20188 yr by AblazeRich2

If you use multi site you can set the language for each in the general settings. This means you can create the menus and widgets in the local language. Keeps them all separate and much better for SEO.

Have three languages can slow down your site a lot... All plugins will need a language module. It is easy to build but difficult to maintain and then you face a lot of issues like missing content, different url for each language etc.

It is better to have different website for different languages.

18 hours ago, prateekshawebdesign said:

Have three languages can slow down your site a lot... All plugins will need a language module. It is easy to build but difficult to maintain and then you face a lot of issues like missing content, different url for each language etc.

It is better to have different website for different languages.

That's not correct. There are loads of ways to internationalize a site without slowing things down. Many platforms support i18n will allows you to build language libraries as mo/po files.

They do slow down the site. The client had a lot of customization like do not show categories if there is no content or do not show menu items if there are no sub categories for that language. 

The main site was in French and English was the secondary language. Some of the pages were missing the English counterpart and those page links could not be showen in the English site, not in the menu, or categories or plugin, recent posts, related posts etc 

The worst was the comments section. Each language had to have it own separate comments list. Comments in French had to be shown only on the French site. and vice versa. No English comment should be shown on the French site.

The language plugin took around 40% of the load time...The site worked fine but it was slow. We used QTranslate  (or was it QTranslate X)...because we could find a QTranslate module for each plugin. Since it was a blog, there were many plugins, like comments, recent posts, related posts, categories, menus etc

The SEO rankings dropped and the traffic slowly but surely kept falling. So we moved the site to a different sub domain name. 

The biggest issue was URL... we had French and English language, With French being the main language, we had NO  /fr/ to the site, but nevertheless, still the pages were created /fr/ and that created another nuisance