The Business of Software

A while back I stumbled upon a service where you could add a translation widget to your webpages.  The user would click their flag and be shown a machine-translation of the page. and subsequent pages.

Naturally the translation won't be great, and it might make the end user hope/expect to get support in their language, but using something like that would at least give the user that doesn't speak your language the _chance_ to look you over.

Has anyone tried using something like this??

Hi Doug,

I haven't tried it yet. It seems to be a good idea.
Personally, I can cope with an "average" translation if the web page is interesting enough to me.

Another question arises:

How to drive that foreign prospect from an external (non translated) link to your web page in the first place?

Shouldn't all of your marketing system be translated?

Doug, this is a very interesting topic. Please guys share your experience with this matter. Thank you.

I tried global translator for WP (Google translate and Biblefish). It brings me a lot of searches from regional Google sites. But now i do not use it due to the bad translation. I can suggest to pay for some manual translation preferably by native speakers.

I went back and searched and the one I stumbled upon earlier was worldlingo.com.  It seems kind of pricey, but easy to integrate.  I have no idea about the quality of the translation though.

isn't it goodle by any chance[1] ?

[1]: http://translate.google.com/translate_tools

Google's machine translation is as good as it gets.

There are easy plugins/modules for WordPress, Drupal and other content management systems and it's mighty easy to add to any website using simple HTML.

If your site is made for very tech savvy visitors who understand the inherent limitations of machine translation, it would be OK. However, if 'normal' visitors see this translation and think that this is the way you express yourself in their language, you're going to do more harm than good.

For fun, take an English paragraph from your site, translate it using machine translation to any language and then back to English. See how you like this translation.

I love the idea of autotranslation, but I'm not convinced it works very well where the product is of some technical nature.

The problem I see with using this shortcut is that you will miss out on a great SEO opportunity.

We began creating single page web pages written in and optimized for particular languages that are important to us, such as French, German, Spanish, Russian.  The content on these sites is abbreviated, but I look at it as a start, and a step in the right direction. 

To build these translated pages, we hired high-rated native speakers with a technical competency through Proz.com. Proz is the "rent-a-coder" of translation services, and I've had great experiences working through this site.

Although the translator could have stuffed the page full of French swear words and I couldn't tell, I have had no complaints about the sites.  It also let us translate important key words and phrases that work well in english.  Acording to Statcounter visitor tracking, these pages have become fairly well placed in Google and other search engines because of this.

When you're a micro-ISV, you can only do what you can do.  I would like to support more languages, place more content out there, etc.

But for a few hundred bucks or less, you can get yourself out there in any language you want.

As for support services, we do what we can do.  If the user doesn't speak english, spanish or russian (the three languages we have people with fluency in) then we go to Babelfish.yahoo.com or Google Translation for help. Often these services will help us deliver support.  We always put the english text below the translated text.

Automatic page translations are bad. You don't want to turn away visitors by having poorly translated content. Use professional translators instead.

I agree with everyone that says "stay away". English is not my first language, so I'm often on the receiving end of machine translated software and web pages. I guess the translated copy looks OK to the author, but to the native reader there can be no doubt that the text is the work of a computer and not a real copywriter. Machine translation is a common tactic with makers of malware programs who hope to con users into thinking the software is safe to install, but it actually makes it easier to see through. It speaks "fraud" to me, and even if the software happened to be legit I wouldn't take another look at it because it tells me that the people behind the product couldn't be bothered to do it properly. Have a real person translate it for you, or just stick with English.

@Jonathan

Thank you for that feedback.  I know bad English is one way I detect fraud/spam - it just hadn't occurred to me that machine-translated websites might raise the same concerns.