Translate any website into 100+ languages.

From 2010 through 2019, Google's free Website Translator widget was the default way to add multilingual support to any site. It was a one-line script tag that wrapped Google Translate's machine-translation engine. In December 2019, Google deprecated it for new installations, citing broader strategy changes at the company and a push toward Google Cloud Translation, the paid API used by Translate behind the scenes. Existing installations kept working for a while but were eventually cut off. The replacement landscape splits into three tiers. Tier 1: paid translation APIs you wrap yourself, primarily Google Cloud Translation Advanced (around $20 per million characters, 130+ languages) and DeepL API (around $5.5 per million characters, 30+ languages with higher quality on European pairs). Tier 2: third-party widget vendors that wrap those APIs, including Poper, Weglot (typically $15+ per month), and Localize (typically $50+ per month for production tiers). Tier 3: full manual i18n, where a human translator localizes every string - the highest quality but typically 10x to 100x the cost of machine translation. Most production sites in 2026 land on Tier 2 with selective Tier 3 for high-stakes pages like landing-page hero copy and pricing pages.

The two engines are not interchangeable. Google Cloud Translation Advanced supports 130+ languages including low-resource ones (Swahili, Maori, Welsh, Basque) and integrates with Google's Neural Machine Translation infrastructure. It is the right default for any site whose audience spans Asia, Latin America, or Africa. DeepL supports a much smaller language set (around 30 languages as of 2026) but is consistently rated higher on European-language pairs by both blind human evaluation and BLEU score benchmarks: German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Polish, Dutch, and Russian translations from DeepL are typically less robotic and preserve more nuance. The pricing favors DeepL on European-heavy traffic ($5.5 per million characters versus $20). The right move for most sites is to mix engines: route DeepL for the European pairs it supports and Google Cloud Translation for everything else. Poper supports per-language engine selection out of the box, including the mixed-engine setup. Both engines bill per character of source text, not per word and not per visitor, so caching translations at the CDN edge (which Poper does automatically) cuts costs dramatically on high-traffic pages.

A translation widget that only swaps text on the client without publishing hreflang annotations earns you zero international SEO benefit: Google sees a single English page and indexes only that. To make Google index your French, German, Japanese, and Spanish versions as separate pages, every language URL needs an hreflang link in the head pointing to every other language version, plus an x-default fallback. The URL pattern can be subdirectory (/fr/, /de/), subdomain (fr.example.com), or query string (?lang=fr); Google supports all three but recommends subdirectories for ease of crawl-budget allocation. Poper auto-publishes hreflang annotations in the page head and adds language-specific URLs to your XML sitemap so Google's crawler discovers and indexes each version separately. Validate after deploy with Google Search Console's International Targeting report, which shows hreflang errors and unmatched language pairs. Sites that get hreflang right typically see organic traffic from non-English Google domains lift 30-80% within 90 days as the new language versions enter the index.

Translating text is the easy part of localization. The harder parts are: right-to-left layouts for Arabic, Hebrew, and Farsi (the entire page mirrors, icons flip, text alignment reverses, navigation order reverses); currency conversion with rates that update daily and respect the visitor's country, not just their language (a German-speaking Swiss visitor wants CHF, not EUR); date formats (DD/MM/YYYY in most of Europe, MM/DD/YYYY in the US, YYYY/MM/DD in Japan); decimal and thousands separators (1,234.56 in the US versus 1.234,56 in Germany); phone number formats; and address formats (postcode position varies). Poper handles RTL flip and date/number formatting automatically using the Intl APIs built into modern browsers. Currency conversion is a separate Poper widget (currency converter) that pairs with translate; together they cover what most ecommerce sites need for cross-border conversion. For high-stakes pages (legal, medical, financial), pair the widget with human review of the translated copy in the override interface.

Be honest with yourself about machine-translation quality. Modern Neural Machine Translation from Google and DeepL is excellent for navigation menus, body copy, FAQs, blog posts, product descriptions, and most checkout copy. It is mediocre to bad on marketing taglines, brand voice, idioms, humor, regional slang, legal disclaimers, regulated medical and financial language, and any copy that depends on cultural context. A tagline like Just Do It or Think Different translated by machine into French or Japanese typically lands flat or wrong. The fix is not to abandon machine translation; it is to use the override interface to lock specific high-stakes phrases (taglines, hero CTAs, brand names, regulated copy) and pay for human translation on those alone. Most sites end up with 95% machine translation plus 5% human override on the strings that matter most. Poper's override interface is built for exactly this workflow: list view of every translated string, side-by-side machine versus override, one-click lock to prevent accidental retranslation. Sites that use the hybrid approach typically rate translation quality 4.2-4.5 out of 5 in user surveys versus 2.8-3.4 for pure machine translation.