WPHindi Plugin Instantly Converts Text from English to Hindi in the Block Editor

Hindi is one of the world’s top languages, with more than 520 million native and non-native speakers, and is the fastest growing language in India. In a region where English is also commonly spoken, many Hindi publishers have the unique requirement of being able to switch back and forth between the two languages when writing articles.

WPHindi is a new plugin that was developed to help WordPress users stay inside the editor instead of copying and pasting from third-party tools.

It offers a block that instantly converts text from English to Hindi as users are typing. It also works with the Classic Editor. The block supports intelligent auto-suggestions that make it easy to correct typos. Users can quickly enable/disable WPHindi with one click when switching between languages. It also works seamlessly with the rich text options inside the editor.

The plugin was originally created by the team at Zozuk, a WordPress support and maintenance service, as a custom solution for a client.

“They are a big publisher in the Hindi content space and with a lot of writers,” Zozuk representative Aditya Rathore said. “Using tools outside the WordPress dashboard was becoming a huge productivity killer for them.”

After this request Zozuk contacted 54 Hindi content publishers who are WordPress users and found that 39 of them were facing the same problem.

“It was more than enough to realize the scale of the problem and we decided to make the plugin available for free to every webmaster including our partners,” Rathore said. “The scale of the problem and how important it was to solve it, proved to be our element of inspiration for WPHindi.”

Data from a KPMG-Google study indicates that 201 million Hindi users, which comprise 38% of the Indian internet user base, will be online by 2021.

WPHindi is currently the only solution of its kind in the WordPress space. An older plugin called Hindi Writer performed a similar function for converting text in the comment box but it was not available from the official plugin directory and has not been updated since 2006.

Hindi publishers have also used tools like google.com/intl/hi/inputtools/try/ and easyhindityping.com but these are not tailored to WordPress and have to be open in a separate window. WPHindi provides text conversion directly in the editor, speeding up writers’ workflow.

Rathore said Zozuk plans to monetize the plugin in the future with an add-on that will allow users to comment in Hindi on the frontend. The plugin is currently in development. The team is is also working on releasing similar plugins for other languages like Bengali and Marathi.