multilingual site w WP Navigator theme in China

Hi everyone,

our english website https://www.mychinaroots.com uses wordpress (with an adjusted navigator theme) and has been working great, but now we want to have a Chinese language version of the site. any suggestions on how this could be done best?

some remarks:
1. it would be best if our homepage could simply show a EN / CN language option, but i’m not sure how easy that will be to implement from an IT perspective, what pros and cons of different options, including the price tags involved. we understand that the WPML and Polylang plugins are good. any comments?
2. a crucial issue is that our homepage uses googlemaps, and because of the problems with google in China, one needs a vpn to access our site from within China. however, we also want our site to be available without vpn and so we’re hoping to find a way to have our english site to remain as is for all those outside China, but to have our chinese language version to simply show a static picture rather than the google maps worldmap for those inside mainland China…

extremely grateful for some ideas or suggestions!