Translation plugins are built to answer one question:
what has not been translated yet? LinguaDrift answers two different ones:
- What has drifted? Someone edited the English page three months ago. The German version still reflects the old copy. From the translation plugin's point of view, the page is translated — nothing flags this.
- What is wrong? A machine translation mangled a product term, a link still points at the source-language page, or a placeholder got dropped. Nobody on the team reads the target language well enough to catch it.
LinguaDrift is an independent QA layer that sits on top of whichever translation plugin your site already uses (WPML or Polylang in this release).
It never translates anything. It audits.
What it checks, free
- Missing translation — a published source page with no translation at all.
- Content drift — the source changed after the translation was last verified in sync. This is the core finding, and it needs a second scan to appear: the first scan establishes the baseline.
- Untranslated content — the target is byte-identical to the source.
- Placeholder mismatch — shortcodes,
%s, and {{merge tags}} that don't match between source and target.
- Markup mismatch — heading structure, link counts, or image counts that diverge.
- Suspicious length — a translation far shorter or longer than expected for the language pair.
- Link not localized — internal links that still point at the source-language version of a page.
How baselines work
LinguaDrift keeps its own record of what each source/target pair looked like the last time they were in sync, because most translation plugins don't.
The first scan for a language pair is a baseline scan — it reports missing translations and structural issues, but not drift. Drift reporting starts on the second scan.
AI agents
LinguaDrift registers read-only abilities with WordPress's Abilities API (WP 6.9+), so agents like Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot can check status, list findings, and start scans — each ability is off by default and must be explicitly enabled per-ability in Settings.
Premium
LinguaDrift Pro is a separate add-on plugin that adds AI-backed semantic quality scoring, glossary enforcement, register/formality consistency checks, scheduled recurring scans, branded PDF reports, and alerts on top of everything in the free plugin. The free plugin keeps working untouched if Pro is deactivated — scanning, all 7 deterministic checks, and the findings dashboard are not limited in any way.