Gloty – AI Translation & Multilingual

Gloty translates your WordPress site with AI machine translation, then stores every translation in your own database and serves it from there. Rendering a translated page never calls a remote service — page delivery stays local and deterministic even if the translation service is slow or unreachable.

The plugin is free. New customers can try the hosted translation service with a one-time allowance of 50,000 characters for one site, with no card required. Start the free Gloty trial or view translation plans and the one-time pack.

Saved translations keep serving locally after the allowance is used; generating more translations needs available hosted allowance.

Serving those pages is built to be cheap. Gloty compiles your translations into a PHP cache file that your server’s OPcache holds in shared memory, so once it is warm a translated page view costs no database queries for translation at all, and the translations take almost no memory in the request. That is aimed squarely at ordinary shared hosting with no object cache, which is where a translation plugin normally slows a site down most.

Where the technique is unavailable, Gloty serves from the database instead and the page is still correct.

The picker offers 38 languages, each with the right hreflang code emitted for it. That list is deliberately shorter than it could be: it is the set both AI engines’ vendors say their models support, rather than every language code in existence. A translation you cannot judge the quality of is worth less than one you can, so Gloty offers the ones where the engines are known to be strong, and every translation it produces is editable by hand.

Producing a translation does require an external service, because machine translation is not something WordPress can do locally. Gloty sends the text that needs translating to the hosted Gloty translator service, which translates it and returns the result to your site in the background. The results land in your WordPress database, are editable by hand, and keep serving with no further external calls.

Key Features:

• 38 languages — the set both AI engines’ vendors list as supported, each with the right hreflang code

• Your database, your translations — stored locally in WordPress, never fetched remotely at render time

• Fast on slow hosting — translations compile into a cache your server holds in memory, so serving a translated page costs no database queries once warm; it falls back to the database safely if your host cannot do that

• Automatic page translation — captures page output, extracts translatable text, queues it for translation

• Entity-aware — posts, pages, taxonomies, and template strings are tracked as distinct sources with stale detection

• Edit any translation — review and correct translations from Gloty → Translations

• Prepare a language before publishing it — translate in the background, check it over, then show it to visitors

• Let someone correct translations without making them an administrator — optionally limited to one language

• A different image per language — for screenshots, diagrams and packaging that carry words

• The language switcher in your menu — as ordinary menu items your theme styles, plus a block

• A sitemap of your translated pages — so search engines can actually find them

• Translate content that loads after the page — load-more, AJAX filters and search panels

• Manual edits are protected — machine sync never silently overwrites a human correction

• Glossary — terms that must never be translated, or that must always render a specific way per language, promotable in one click from any translation you are looking at

• SEO-friendly — hreflang tags, translated meta, clean /fr/page/ URLs, and optional translated page addresses (/de/ueber-uns/)

• Language switcher — floating widget, footer list, shortcode, or sidebar widget

• Optional browser-language redirect — off by default, crawler-safe, remembered per visitor

• WooCommerce compatible — products, cart, checkout, store AJAX fragments, and order emails sent in the language the customer shopped in

• Gettext integration — translates WordPress, theme, and plugin UI strings

• AI translation engine — OpenAI or Google Gemini, selected for you by the service on every plan

• Background processing — queued dispatch with webhook delivery and a polling fallback

• Export and import — hand a language to a translator as XLIFF or CSV, load their corrections back, or simply take a copy of your translations

• WP-CLI — wp gloty export, wp gloty import, wp gloty languages

• Developer extensible — filters and a REST API

How it works:

• Install Gloty and connect your site to the Gloty translator service

• Add your target languages

• Gloty discovers translatable content from your posts, taxonomies, and template strings

• Translation runs in the background and the results are written to your database

• Visitors get translated pages under language-prefixed URLs (/fr/, /de/, …) and can switch languages from the switcher

Translation requires an external machine-translation service. See External services below for exactly what is sent and to whom.

com/gloty/docs/

External services

Gloty cannot produce translations without an external machine-translation service, because machine translation is not something WordPress can do locally. This section describes every external request the plugin makes, what it sends, and when.

Nothing is sent anywhere until you have connected your site and translation has been triggered (by a scan, a Translate action, or scheduled background dispatch). Serving an already-translated page makes no external request at all.

1. The Gloty translator service

All translation work is performed by the hosted Gloty translator service. The plugin does not contact machine-translation providers directly; it sends work to the Gloty service, which selects and calls the translation engine on your behalf and delivers the results back to your site.

• Service host: https://gloty-api.wp-shelf.com (overridable by defining the GLOTY_SERVICE_URL constant, for example to point at a self-hosted instance of the service).

• What is sent: the source text to be translated (page, post, taxonomy, and template strings from your site), the source and target language codes, your site URL, and a per-site API token and license key used to identify and authenticate your site.

• What is not sent: Gloty does not read text off your cart, checkout, order or account pages, because those are written about one customer rather than for every visitor, and it skips any string carrying an email address that is not your own. If a page of yours shows a customer’s details and you translate it, tell us — that is a gap, not a setting.

• When: on connection verification, while dispatching queued translation batches, when polling for results, and when the service delivers results back to your site over a signed webhook.

• Who: the Gloty translator service, operated by WP Shelf.

• Terms of service: https://wp-shelf.com/terms

• Privacy policy: https://wp-shelf.com/privacy

The Gloty service in turn passes your text to the AI translation engine it selects for the batch — OpenAI or Google Gemini. Their terms apply to that processing:

• OpenAI — https://openai.com/policies/terms-of-use / https://openai.com/policies/privacy-policy

• Google Gemini — https://ai.google.dev/terms / https://policies.google.com/privacy

2. org translation packs

org to install the official WordPress and plugin language packs for that locale, using WordPress core’s own updater. This is the same request WordPress itself makes and sends no site content.

Gloty does not send analytics, telemetry, or usage tracking anywhere. The optional browser page-view counter described in the changelog posts to your own site’s REST API and nowhere else: it is not an external request, it carries only the language of the page, and no third party is involved.

Filters

gloty_compiled_map_enabled

Whether Gloty may compile your translations into a PHP cache file for OPcache to hold in memory. The value passed in is Gloty’s own verdict on whether the server can benefit — return false to switch the feature off entirely, in which case translations are served from the object cache, a transient, or the database, exactly as in earlier versions.

add_filter( 'gloty_compiled_map_enabled', '__return_false' );

restrict_api hides the OPcache status from plugin code. Do not force it on where OPcache is genuinely off: every request would then compile the cache file from source, which is slower than the database read it replaces.

php disables it before any filter can run, and Gloty honours WordPress’s own DISALLOW_FILE_MODS constant without any configuration.

gloty_compiled_map_max_bytes

The largest cache file Gloty will write, in bytes. Default 8 MB. A translation set that would exceed it keeps using the database.

Source code

The admin interface is compiled from JavaScript sources before release. json. json; no minified or obfuscated code is included without its source.

Security

Found a security issue? com rather than opening a

public support thread — a forum post is world-readable the moment you send it,

on a plugin installed on other people’s sites. You will get an acknowledgement

within 72 hours, and credit in the changelog unless you would rather not have it.

How do I review translations captured for one post or term?

Open Translations, find a row with a Post or Term context, and choose Review this post or Review this term in its row actions. The workspace groups the cached strings captured for that exact item, including body segments. Your language, status, staleness and wording filters still apply.

Clear content item returns to the wider list. Shared theme and interface strings may also appear on the item’s pages; they keep their own capture context and are not included. This does not scan a page, request translation work, or change file exports.