viLatin script

How to translate WordPress to Vietnamese

Vietnamese (Tiếng Việt) reaches roughly ~85 millionspeakers. Here's what's actually involved in translating a WordPress site into it — the technical setup, the Vietnamese-specific gotchas, and the SEO.

hreflang
vi
Native
Tiếng Việt
Direction
LTR
Text length
+about the same as English
Plurals
No grammatical plural (uses classifiers)
“Welcome”
Chào mừng

What's specific to Vietnamese

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 Vietnamese:

  • Latin script but with dense stacked diacritics (tone + vowel marks like ế, ượ) — needs a font with full Vietnamese coverage and enough line-height.
  • Mostly monosyllabic; text length is manageable.
  • Formality: Pronoun choice encodes relationship/age — nuanced.

Step by step

1. Add Vietnamese as a target language

Set your source language, then add Vietnamese (vi) 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 Vietnamese 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 Vietnamese under a language-prefixed path like /vi/. Give pages readable slugs with the slug generator.

4. Get the Vietnamese SEO right

Add reciprocal hreflang pointing at your vi version (with x-default), set <html lang="vi">, 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 Vietnamese 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 Vietnamese to your WordPress site in minutes — automatic AI translation, stored in your own database.

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