Translation used to be artisanal. Do you remember those times? There were people paid to translate and transcribe entire texts, articles and books by hand. We are not talking about the last century. Barely twenty-five years ago, translation was still manual. Back in school in the early 2000s, we carried actual physical dictionaries to English class. That’s how it was done.

A few years later, online translation tools changed the game entirely. Translation became automatic, fast, effortless; but also erratic and short on context.

Three years ago, we faced this situation with clients who were expanding into new markets or had a multilingual audience. We didn’t want to manually create copies of our webpages in another language. It was heavy, complicated and messy to manage. We heard about Weglot, the French-born multilingual tool for web content, so we decided to give it a try. It didn’t disappoint. It worked perfectly for what we needed: an efficient, versatile tool that helped us manage everything without code complications.

Funny enough, three years later, we find ourselves writing an article about them. Weglot has upgraded its service and introduced new features in version 2.0, a tool that promises to change how translation works, especially in SEO, management and brand voice, all powered by AI. Weglot also builds for digital agencies like Lento, so it might be worth analyzing what the new version brings.

Lento has been a creative agency for six years, and man, oh man, what those years have taught us! We’ve seen all kinds of situations with our clients. One of the lessons learned is that managing a multilingual site used to be a real pain in the ass. The sentiment is shared among other digital agencies like ours. We bear witness.

Translation was never the problem, meaning the actual words or how accurate they were. The problem was managing a different site for each language, content that drifted out of sync, plugins and translation files to maintain. Endless hours, and not much joy in the workplace.

What drove us to Weglot in the first place was the structure and simplicity we found in the tool, without being forced to duplicate pages. And this new version keeps that core and builds on it.

That core works like this: translations aren’t stored in your database or in duplicated pages, they’re served from Weglot’s cloud. New content is detected and queued for translation, and it works alongside the major WordPress page builders and SEO plugins. At least, that’s how Weglot describes it.

This means the old trade-off, more languages for more maintenance, is largely gone. What remains is a quieter problem: the words are right, but do they sound like the brand?

The other problem we found back then, and still find now , is that accurate translation is one thing and your brand voice another. None of the automated translation we tried could guarantee that your voice survives the trip. Taking everything literally is what machines do, and translation is where it shows. The result was flat, over-formal copy that inspired nothing.

Many of the brand voices we build in agencies like ours are inspired by real culture. They have to be, because that’s how people speak and interact. When a tool fails to capture it, it stops being worth using. Even the big AI models still stumble here, and they’re putting a lot of effort into “culturizing” themselves. But that’s another conversation.

Weglot’s audience includes agencies like us, who spend their days shaping a company’s digital persona online and want to share the right tone across every channel. In short, we just want our brands to sound like themselves, and to run the operation behind it without unnecessary processes.

With that in mind, the company’s 2.0 puts brand voice at the center of the translation. You describe your brand voice once: its tone, its audience, the words that must never change. Then you add plain-language rules, like a formal register in French and an informal one in German, or a slogan that needs an precise translation in English. The AI reads all of that before it translates a line. According to Weglot, it can also go back and improve translations you already have, in bulk.

This means your brand voice stays under your control, and less exposed to cultural accidents. Of course, like any AI tool, it still needs a human review step, and professional translators for legal pages. The tool can keep a voice from getting lost at the border. Deciding what that voice is remains in your domain.

Four years ago, we were talking with our team about SEO and how everyone was so into it. Back then, we thought that advertising was slowly changing from something you did to talk directly to your customers into a system you build, not only for your customers, but also for the machines standing between you and them. Well, we were not far from the mark.

Back then, we carefully crafted web copy and optimized our words so we could be picked up by keywords. Now, the story has evolved, especially with two of the new players, AI Overviews and ChatGPT, and the aim is to be cited in searches within the categories our clients’ products serve.

In this scenario, companies like Weglot are making a case for translation as part of the answer. In short, a crawler reads your pages, an AI tool searches for the ones that match a question, and then it writes an answer and links to its sources. A page that isn’t indexed can’t be cited at all, and Weglot’s own data suggests a page that doesn’t exist in the asker’s language gets cited less.

Weglot’s job is that first step: giving each language its own readable, indexable page, with the tags that connect them, handled automatically, according to the company. Whether you get cited depends on what’s on the page and the strategy behind it. Weglot delivers the structure, and you still bring the magic.

A Weglot’s study tells the story of a Spanish retailer that sells English titles. The retailer doesn’t have a site in English, and the study finds it appears 64% less often (36 per 100) in AI Overviews and ChatGPT for English queries. When it does appear, the link goes to Google Translate’s proxy, a copy of the page hosted on a Google address, so the retailer doesn’t capture the traffic.

It may not be an isolated case. Google says it doesn’t host any translated pages and that users can still see the original. Traffic is the visible loss, but the quieter one is that the voice speaking for your brand in that language was nobody’s decision.

This is where Weglot’s answer comes in. It gives the brand its own version in each language, on its own address, with the tags that tell Google which page is which. With 2.0, it also lets you set your brand voice and guidelines before a single line is translated.

Three years ago, we chose Weglot because it offered structure and simplicity in an already complicated digital translation landscape. Now, with 2.0, the reason to stay is coherence. This version opens the door for companies and agencies like ours to rely on a tool that respects our craft and the voice we’ve built, with neurons and passion, for our brands.

This is the biggest upgrade we’ve seen from the company. The tool carries the voice, but you still write it and, above all, you stay in control of how your brand communicates, whether in Swahili or Canadian English.

At the beginning of this century, translation used to be artisanal. Now, with tools like Weglot, the craft has moved from doing the translating to deciding how the brand sounds.

This piece was sponsored by Weglot. Going global shouldn’t mean choosing between slow and sloppy. Most teams taking their website international get stuck between the manual way, with spreadsheets and endless chasing of translators, and vibe-coding a multilingual site with AI that ships fast until the SEO quietly breaks. Weglot sits in the middle: AI-powered translation you stay in control of, with an SEO-ready structure on every CMS from WordPress to Webflow and Shopify. Trusted by more than 110,000 websites, from HBO to Decathlon. See how Weglot works.