Earlier this year I showed you how to Give Your WordPress Blog a Voice with Amazon Polly and walked you through the steps involved in installing, configuring, and using the Amazon Polly for WordPress plugin. Today we are making this plugin even more powerful, adding the ability to translate your content into one or more languages and to produce audio versions of each translation. The translation is implemented using Amazon Translate, a neural machine translation service that is part of our portfolio of machine learning services.

The original version of the plugin works like this:

And the new version works like this:

This version of the plugin supports translation of English-language web content into Spanish, German, French, and Portuguese, with plans to support other languages in the future.

Updating and Configuring the Plugin

My earlier post covered the steps involved in launching an Amazon Lightsail instance and setting up the plugin, and I won’t repeat them here. The first step is to edit my existing IAM policy so that it allows calls to the TranslateText function:

Then I log in to the WordPress Admin dashboard, click Plugins, and see that a new version is available:

I click update now, and wait a few seconds for the update. Then I click Settings to enable translation:

I click Enable translation support and Save Changes, then come back and set up the details. I select all of the available target languages, leave the voices and labels as-is, and click Save Changes to move forward:

Creating Translations and Vocalizations

Now I can create a new post and exercise the plugin. I enter the title and text for the post as usual:

Before moving forward, I can click How much will this cost to convert? to check on costs.

The price seems reasonable to me. I publish the post, and then click Translate to generate audio in 4 other languages. This happens in a matter of seconds:

The published post now includes a player that lets me listen to the original audio or any of the 4 translations:

Here are the audio versions:

English: Spanish: German: French: Portuguese:

I have lots of customization options. For example, I can enable transcripts of the translated text:

The transcripts are shown in the post:

I can change the labels that are used for each language:

Here are the updated labels:

I can also specify the Polly voice for each target language:

Now Available

The updated plugin is available now and you can start using it today! As you can see, it uses the “magic” of machine translation and text-to-speech to make your web content accessible to a wider audience, in both written and spoken form.

— Jeff;