Translating your Website with GoogleWritten by: Haily, Jenny | Learn how you can reach a worldwide audience using the information powerhouse that is Google.

Reaching out to a worldwide audience isn’t as difficult or expensive as it sounds or as it has to be. Using a new service provided by Google, your website can receive visitors using basically any language. With the resources Google offers for free, your website can be translated into any one of 51 total languages.

But how does it work? On this page, Google will give a code to place on your website along with any options you may want to set for the code. This little strip of code, being from Google, will do so much more for your website.

First, it will place a drop down list allowing the visitor to translate the current page into another language if they desire. And if you place the code in every page of your website, then this visitor will be able to browse from page to page on your website using Google Translate without a problem.

Second, the code will also detect the language configured in the visitor’s web browser as his/her default language. And if the default language is different than the language on the page, then a blue bar will appear at the top of the page asking the visitor if he/she would like a translation, of course provided by Google.

It’s a really interesting and useful feature. This can help you open up your website to visitors of various languages all the while making it much more professional. While avoiding the language barrier, your website will still be able to receive visitors via a variety of languages.

Edit by Jenny
Google Translate is like most other things from Google, absolutely top-notch. It is amazing and by far outstrips webpage translators from Yahoo or others because of how thorough it is. By testing IC in Chinese (a non-Latin language) it translates everything: the chatbox, forum threads and replies, drop-down navigation (at top)and even people's names (phonetically unless your name is an object like, Ember or Icy). They've translated 'Jenny' as '珍妮', the second half which is my actual Chinese name. And the main thing is that they're consistent about translating these names. There are dozens of combinations to make the sound 'jenny' in Chinese but they keep the same two characters all the way through. No confusion! It's brilliant in Chinese and probably all the rest.

I then decided to test the accuracy of this translator by finding a non-English site and translating it into English. I used 'www.livio.com', thanks Haily's dad and BTW, it's looking very good. By reading it's privacy policy page I deduced that the level of accuracy was very high. Top marks.

   

| Written by: Haily, Jenny | Added: Nov 27 2009 | Last Modified: Dec 21 2009 | Views: 1,106 | (Log in to rate) |

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