We recently started a WooCommerce project for a client who had thousands of items in their catalog. They needed the site in Arabic and English, and probably a few more languages later down the road. When I started looking for professional translators, I’ll be honest: the quotes I got were terrifying. I looked at the prices, then I looked at my computer, and I felt a bit out of the loop. We live in the age of AI, after all. I can ask a chatbot to write code or explain quantum physics while I drink my coffee, so I couldn't understand why translating a product description still costs more than the product itself.
The old way of doing things is part of the problem. Most agencies still charge by the word. That works fine if you are translating a famous novel, but it doesn’t make much sense for five thousand different types of door handles. If you have half a million words to translate, you shouldn't have to mortgage your house to pay for it. The experts always talk to me about "nuance" and "cultural tone," claiming that AI can't understand the soul of a language. Maybe they are right, but I’m not selling poetry; I’m selling spare parts. A "10mm steel bolt" doesn't have a soul. It just needs to be a "10mm steel bolt" in Arabic so the customer can find what they need.
I thought about just using AI myself, but the logistics were a mess. I couldn't copy and paste every single product title into Gemini or ChatGPT manually—I’d lose my mind by the third page. Even if I hired a team to do it, e-commerce moves too fast. Updates happen every day, and a manual process just isn't worth the headache. I did some research and saw that most translation services for WordPress use WPML. It’s a great tool that handles the "plumbing"—it knows where the English is and where the Arabic should go—but these tools usually want you to pay for their own specific translation credits.
I sat there looking at my screen and realized I already had the API keys for Gemini, Claude, and ChatGPT sitting right here. I decided to build a bridge on top of WPML. I didn't want to reinvent the wheel; I just wanted to give it a better brain. I wrote a script that looks at the translation jobs WPML creates, grabs the text, sends it to an AI API, and pushes the translation back into the site. It sounds simple when I say it like that, and of course, I usually think things are "simple" right before I spend all night fixing a bug I created. But once I added options for different AI providers and set up the hooks and filters for other developers, it worked.
The result was remarkably successful. We translated thousands of products, and I didn't even have to pull out my credit card for extra credits. Gemini did a fantastic job with the technical terms. Once the code was tested and working, I realized I’ve spent my whole career using tools built by people I’ve never met. WordPress and WooCommerce are only possible because of the community, and I wanted to give something back.
I’ve released the plugin as open-source under the GPL3 license, and you can find it at https://github.com/ERPGulf/erpgulf-woo-translator. It’s a simple, maybe even a bit of a silly attempt to return what I’ve received from the open-source world. If it helps one developer avoid a terrifying quote or a week of data entry, then I’m happy. The community is amazing, and this is just my small way of saying thanks.