Wednesday, August 18, 2010

Translating Web Pages.

For my Arma Blog I've noticed that a large number of people visiting my site are not from English speaking countries. Taken as a whole citizens of non-English countries are the bulk of the readers of the blog. (Thank you Google Analytics for tracking this info.) This is not surprising since OFP, ArmA and Arma II have always been more popular outside North America.

So I took a look around to see what my options were. I could pay someone to translate existing and future  pages into the dozen or so languages, but I'm making exactly $0 off my little hobby so this is not an option. I had been relying on people using Google's web page translation service if they were having problems reading my English. This assumes they know about it and want to go through the extra steps to translate the page they are interested in.
Looking at the available Wordpress translation plugins I went with Global Translator
  1.  It only translates pages that readers have requested into the languages they require - nothing extraneous
  2. If the required page has not previously been translated the plugin automatically sends the page to Google translate, caching the page for future use.
  3. The plugin integrates with my existing Google XML Sitemaps, so any cached pages are automatically submitted to the search engines with my next XML sitemap update.
Pretty darn slick. Since I installed the plugin yesterday 31 pages have been translated, so people are finding this useful.

    2 comments:

    1. Well the translator works, but I didn't realize one thing - Google is translating my code samples as well. Oops!

      I wonder if I can tell it to exclude those?

      ReplyDelete
    2. Yes you can tell it to exclude text translation with class="notranslate" in the html
      eg. < pre class="notranslate" >

      or < span class="notranslate" >

      All the search & replace Wordpress plugins didn't work, so now I have to do it by hand. @!#$%!

      ReplyDelete