Learn how to move from ICanLocalize to Private Translation Cloud (PTC) to continue translating your WordPress sites with AI. With PTC, you get human-quality translations at a fraction of the cost.
If you’ve been using ICanLocalize with WPML to translate your WordPress site, all your translations are already stored safely in your site’s database. They remain available in WPML, and won’t disappear when ICanLocalize closes.
To continue translating your site, switch to Private Translation Cloud (PTC) in WPML. The process takes just three steps:
1. Deactivate ICanLocalize as your translation service
2. Select PTC as your translation engine in WPML settings
3. Provide basic context about your website so PTC can generate human-quality, context-aware translations
Why Switch to PTC for Translating WordPress Content
By switching to PTC, you keep your existing ICanLocalize translations and continue adding new ones with the same high quality—at a much lower cost. PTC offers:
- Human-quality, context-aware translations – trusted by WPML users who leave 99.5% of translations untouched.
- Lower costs – about €2.36 for a 1,000-word page, a fraction of human translation rates.
- Free translation credits – included with every WPML purchase or renewal, so you can test PTC risk-free.
How to Switch from ICanLocalize to PTC in WPML
To enable Private Translation Cloud (PTC) for new translations:
- Go to WPML → Translation Dashboard and click on the Translators tab.
- Deactivate the ICanLocalize translation service.
- Go to WPML → Settings. In the AI Translation section at the top of the page, select Private Translation Cloud (PTC) as your translation engine.
- Use the fields in Context and Target Audience to tell PTC what your site does and who it’s for. In How to Translate Names, choose what PTC should do with popular English terms and names. This information helps PTC generate human-quality translations that fit your brand’s tone and voice.
Selecting Private Translation Cloud (PTC) as the translation engine
Telling PTC about your website and target audience
Translating Your Content with PTC
Now that PTC is enabled, the process of translating your content is virtually the same as when you used ICanLocalize:
- Go to WPML → Translation Dashboard and select the content you want to translate.
- Choose the Translate automatically option and confirm that PTC is set as the default translation engine. You should also see a cost overview for translating the selected content with PTC.
- Choose a review mode for when WPML finishes translating your content. With PTC providing human-quality and context-aware translations, it’s recommended to Publish without review.
Sending content for AI translation with PTC
Once WPML finishes translating, your translations appear on the site when you switch languages.
Updating Translations Created with ICanLocalize
Sometimes, the default language content you previously translated with ICanLocalize will change, and you’ll want to update those translations.
While the translations created with ICanLocalize remain in your database, it’s important to note that when you use PTC in WPML, all translations go through the Advanced Translation Editor. This editor provides a clean interface and translation memory, but it does not have access to translations created using a different method (such as ICanLocalize).
This means that when you update existing content and choose to translate it automatically with PTC, WPML can not reuse the ICanLocalize translations. Instead, PTC will retranslate the updated content from scratch.
The good news is that the cost of using PTC is very low, and you can rely on it to deliver human-quality, context-aware translations for your updated content.