Wimpel

Wimpel makes a WordPress site multilingual without rebuilding WordPress for it. A translation is not a special construct here. It is an ordinary post or page with its own permalink. Wimpel only remembers which posts belong together and derives everything else from that: the hreflang links for search engines, the language switcher on the front end, and the language column in your post list.

That has a practical reason. Multilingual setups that rely on their own URL rules, a front-end proxy or a separate database structure tend to produce surprises with every theme change, every caching plugin and every migration. Wimpel does not touch your permalinks and registers no rewrite rules. If you uninstall Wimpel, every translation stays in place as normal content.

Wimpel is part of the Hafenstudios fleet. It works on its own and cooperates with the other fleet plugins once they are active.

What Wimpel does

• Set up languages freely: code, display name, short label or flag, and hreflang code
• Link translations directly in the meta box on the post, with a search
• Create a translation draft with one click: Wimpel copies title, content and excerpt into a draft and links it
• hreflang links in the page source, bidirectional, with self-reference and x-default
• Language switcher as a block and as the shortcode [wimpel], with its own small stylesheet; compact with the short label only for a header
• Language column and language filter in the post and page lists, including a “+ EN” link for missing translations
• Home page per language: if a page has no translation, the switcher leads there instead of nowhere
• “Source changed since the translation” on every translation, with a list of what changed, so you know where to look
• You choose which content types all of this applies to
• Right-to-left languages (Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Urdu and more) get the right text direction per page, including the theme’s RTL stylesheet
• Menu items follow the language of the page, in classic menus and in the Navigation block
• Bulk action and REST route to create translation drafts for many pages at once

Optional: AI translation, and translations that follow the source

Everything above works without any external service and stays free. If you want, Wimpel can also translate for you. This is off by default and needs two things you set up yourself: an access (your own key with Anthropic or an OpenAI-compatible provider) and your explicit opt-in. Until then not a byte leaves your site.

With it switched on, the “wake” keeps translations in step with the source: change a page in your main language, and ten minutes after the last save Wimpel updates its translations. Only the sections that changed are translated; everything else stays, including anything you changed by hand in the translation. Each translation has one of three states: in the wake (follows automatically), pilot on board (changes land as a comparison draft first), or at anchor (never updated). Blocks with the CSS class wimpel-anker are never touched, and a monthly cap in words keeps the cost where you put it. Every automatic update leaves an ordinary WordPress revision.

hreflang that behaves

The hreflang links appear only once a group has at least two published translations. Drafts and private posts stay out, and a single post produces no output at all. If another plugin on your site already handles hreflang, one checkbox in the settings switches the output off.

Privacy

No tracking, no cookie, and without the optional AI translation no request to any other server, in the admin area or on the front end. Wimpel stores its settings and a few post meta values on the post: the language, the translation group, the mark as a language home page, and checksums of the sections of the source so it can tell what changed. No content is copied anywhere.

External services

Wimpel connects to an external service only if you set up an access under Wimpel > Settings > AI translation and switch the AI translation on. Nothing is sent before that, and nothing is sent without your opt-in.

Your own key: the text of the posts you translate (title, content, excerpt, without HTML structure) is sent directly to the provider you configure, either https://api.anthropic.com/ (Anthropic, https://www.anthropic.com/legal/terms, https://www.anthropic.com/legal/privacy) or the endpoint of an OpenAI-compatible provider you enter yourself, under that provider’s terms.

You should sign a data processing agreement with the provider before translating content that contains personal data.