What is the hreflang code for Japanese?

The hreflang / BCP-47 code for Japanese is "ja". Use it in hreflang tags and the attribute.

Does translating to Japanese change my layout?

Japanese text is Often −20–40% shorter (but taller line height). Leave room in buttons and menus so translated text doesn't clip.

jaCJK script

How to translate WordPress to Japanese

Japanese (日本語) reaches roughly ~125 millionspeakers. Here's what's actually involved in translating a WordPress site into it — the technical setup, the Japanese-specific gotchas, and the SEO.

Translate to Japanese with Gloty

hreflang

Native

日本語

Direction

LTR

Text length

Often −20–40% shorter (but taller line height)

Plurals

No grammatical plural

“Welcome”

ようこそ

What's specific to Japanese

Most of translating WordPress is the same in any language, but each language has quirks that break layouts or SEO if you ignore them. For Japanese:

No spaces between words — line-breaking works differently; avoid CSS that assumes spaces.
Mixes three scripts (kanji, hiragana, katakana) — use fonts with full CJK coverage.
Text is shorter but needs more vertical line-height; test dense UI.
Formality: Multiple politeness levels (keigo) — consistency matters a lot.

Step by step

1. Add Japanese as a target language

Set your source language, then add Japanese (ja) as a target. With an automatic plugin you don't create a translated copy of every page by hand — it translates on the fly.

2. Translate — automatically or by hand

Machine and AI translation get you Japanese coverage in minutes; review the strings that matter (navigation, calls to action, legal) for the right register. Estimate the cost with the translation cost calculator.

3. Serve it under a clean URL

Publish Japanese under a language-prefixed path like /ja/. Give pages readable slugs with the slug generator — important for Japanese, since CJK characters otherwise become percent-encoded in URLs.

4. Get the Japanese SEO right

Add reciprocal hreflang pointing at your ja version (with x-default), set <html lang="ja">, and translate titles and meta descriptions. Build the tags with the hreflang generator and verify with the hreflang checker.

Doing it the easy way

Gloty translates your whole site into Japanese automatically with the AI provider you choose, stores it in your own database, and emits the correct hreflang and lang/dir attributes for you. See how it stacks up against Weglot and WPML, or read the pillar guide on making WordPress multilingual.

Add Japanese to your WordPress site in minutes — automatic AI translation, stored in your own database.

Try Gloty free