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October 23rd, 2011 - by Mohamed Adel
Everybody is looking for Excellency and perfection; this also applies also on internet websites. As internet grows it becomes more important to have all users among the world understand your website content in their native language. Regardless the fancy design, organized, and accurate content, have you ever thought that you’re losing a class of users who is leaving your website just because they didn’t understand it?
Website in Many Languages
Your current website is using one single language, and creating another version with another language is not that cheap, besides you’ll have to worry again about your design, and codes. What about something that would take around 5 minutes implementation besides you’ll not have to touch your design files, or even your core code files.
Google Translation Tool
A few years ago Google has launched a translation tool, which everybody can use it for translating words, paragraphs or even an entire piece of content, and soon they got more advanced by providing link translation where you can provide them a URL and they got back with its translation. A few months ago I found something which is really interesting, I found that you can install a small piece of code and then you’ll be able to have your website in many languages, without any advanced implementation, or even worrying about the design changes. All you have to do is to place a small piece of code to the very top of your HTML page.
Is Google Translation Tool accurate?
As we all knows that Google translation is a human based translation which is not 100% accurate, and usually it gives just traditional translation, but having something is better than having nothing at all, besides by time they are advancing and one day you’ll be able to rely on their translation.
Will the translation tool sends the users to the proper language page?
No, the visitors of your website must select the proper language they want to use, because basically this is not a feature of your website, it is just something that can provide more languages.
What about flash files, and image files Will they be translated?
Simply No, the tool translates only the textual content, which means that you’ll not be able even to provide translated images, or flash files.
What about the Right-To-Left Languages, will the translation do the HTML page direction?
Yes, if you select a language with right to left direction (eg. Arabic Language), then the tool will switch the direction of the page, and might mess your design, if it is not prepared. To test your HTML you can place this (dir=”RTL”) attribute to the <HTML> tag and see what the page will look like.
Will the Google translation tool mess with my design, or code files?
In many cases, especially with Right to left languages unfortunately yes it might mess your design, but in most languages no it will not (eg. English to French). But
Ok, I’m convinced where can I obtain the code?
To obtain the translation to your website, all you have to do is following the steps below:
- Go to Google Website Translate page By Clicking here
- In the website you’ll find a number of steps (mostly 4 steps), set them according to what you want to have in your website, the steps are as follow:
– Type of translation: You can set it as entire page, or just a section in your page.
– Language: where you can select your website language.
– Optional Settings: This contains three elements; Languages you want to enable for translation, display mode of the translation area, and some advanced settings.
– The Code you’ll need to place in your website.
- When you finish adjusting the options of how you want the translation to function, just copy the code provided, then paste it where you want the translation bar to appear within the <body> tag. If you want the translation to be available for all pages, simply add the translation code to all pages of your website, or to a shared page among your website.
- Now you’re finished adding the translation to your website, and it should be looking like this.
Some concerns about Google Website Translation
- The translation provided by Google Translation tool is very traditional (Due to many human corrections), which means that you must use native and correct language (Spelling and grammar), otherwise you’ll have incorrect translation, and of course it will impact your website trending.
- There are some other translation tools, like Yahoo Babel Fish, and Microsoft Bing Translator, to be honest I didn’t tried them myself in order to be able to compare between them and Google translation tool. If anyone has tried them, please post in the comments section about the experience.
Final Conclusion
If your website consists of small pieces of content (Such as corporate website) then you may need to try Google Translation tool, otherwise if your website has many content, and maybe articles, in this case I don’t really recommend you use this tool because most of the translations will be wrong and of course it will affect your website trending.
If you have any Comments, Additions, or even corrections please post them in the comments in order to spread the experience to everybody passing by this article.
Your feedback is really appreciated, please contact me for any additional information [Mohamed Adel Mohamed]!
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October 23rd, 2011 at 12:06 pm
Very nice post, also the screenshots demonstration looks good too, I’ve never used it before but I’ll make sure to do on my next website, but I’m afraid of 2 things 1- the word by word unlogic translation 2- the design crashes in rtl languages.
also if you are a blog user you can save your time instead of going through the code by your self and install a plugin called GTranslate which is also providing runtime translation without posting the page back.
October 23rd, 2011 at 12:26 pm
In fact the word by word translation or traditional translation could be the worst thing in Google Translation tool, because its human based, and the word itself may have different meanings, but we all hopes that by time it becomes more enhanced.
Regarding the LTR and RTL, this can be tested by going to the tag and add the property dir=”rtl”. I guess most developers (In the future) will make sure their design is not crashed on RTL or LTR.
Finally to be honest I didn’t tried the GTranslate, Yahoo Babel Fish, or Microsoft Bing Translator. These tools might be more accurate than Google Translation Tool. I think I should be trying them and make a simple comparison between all of them.