Support multilingual rewriting and translation via AI

[jeffpaul]

Explore AI-powered translation and multilingual rewriting for post content. This could include translating content between languages or rewriting content to target a specific language variant.

This work should be evaluated as an experiment and designed to coexist with WordPress internationalization practices (and where the Multilingual phase 4 work in Gutenberg has context we should align to work there as well).

Acceptance criteria:

• Ability to translate or rewrite content between languages using AI
• Language selection is explicit and user-controlled
• Clear separation between AI translation and core i18n tooling
• Behavior is opt-in and non-destructive

[yogeshbhutkar]

Hey @jeffpaul!

Thanks for raising this issue. It resonated with me, and I’d be interested in working on it.

As a first step, I’ve put together a working proof of concept and attached a short video recording to show how it could look in practice. I’d be happy to incorporate any suggestions or feedback you may have before moving forward. As a follow-up, we could also explore adding a post-level option to translate content.

Based on your feedback, I’ll open a PR for review.

translate-content.mov

cc: @dkotter

[dkotter]

Curious for Jeff's thoughts here but not sure on the use case for being able to translate individual blocks? May be better to just start with full article translation?

If we do want this at the block level, may be worth including this in our Content Resizing Feature, since that already allows you to rephrase content (and seems like translation fits nicely into that).

[yogeshbhutkar]

The idea of initiating translation for the entire article made sense to me, so I’ve refactored my changes to support that flow.

I’ve also implemented this as a batch processing operation, similar to how editorial notes are handled. Please let me know what you think, and I’d be happy to polish this further and open a PR for review.

Thanks!

generate-translation-feature.mov

[dkotter]

I’ve also implemented this as a batch processing operation, similar to how editorial notes are handled. Please let me know what you think, and I’d be happy to polish this further and open a PR for review.

This looks good to me, nice work here! Happy to review a PR once that's ready