Global Translator WordPress Plugin for Multilingual Blogging
Today I added another nice wordpress plugin to my list of top wordpress plugins I use. It is called the Global Translator, by Davide Pozza, that dynamically translates a blog by wrapping the Google Translation Engine.
I have been pondering about installing a WordPress translation plugin for quite some time. Though there are several multilingual plugins available, I decided to go with Global Translator, since it seemed popular enough (visible on many respected sites, so you know it is working well enough) is compatible with WordPress 2.1 (I recently upgraded), installation seemed simple enough (I did not want anything too complex which I do not understand anything about), the comments on the posts suggest author support and a range of happy supporters and it created search engine friendly urls with some caching support.
The installation is simple. Upload it to Plugins folder, activate from plugins menu, set your options, insert the code in the template and you are done. It has some nice options once you get to the WordPress admin – Number of flags per row, language of choice and some experimental caching feature.
Another choice of a strong and popular language translation plugin which I was looking up for WordPress is the Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro. It has some amazing powerful features, machine translation, more customizations, more languages supported, good caching… but costs one time $30 (with free lifetime upgrades). You might look into that too.
Translation Benefits
# Support Multilingual International readers – Allowing readers to translate your blog in their language of choice is an essential feature to improve readership.
# SEO Benefits – By creating search engine friendly urls, top search engines will index your non english content (which I understand is the only exception to duplicate content), and increase your pages in the search index, drawing more visitors in local languages.
Translation Drawbacks
Most language translation tools use Google Translation services or Yahoo babelfish. The translated text may be far from perfect (or people may misinterpret your view) when compared to a manual translation. So you can be prepared for that…
Update: Google 403 errors were reported earlier, and the updated WordPress Translator Plugin Fixes 403 Errors
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Hmm, the French is a bit dodgy but acceptable. I’d be curious to hear how much use this gets though after the initial rush of try-outs like myself.
Not sure either about the SEO benefits as the urls remain in the original English.
Thanks PC, I was just thinking of buying Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro
This one does it all!
Thanks for saving 30 bucks!
Hm, after deleting and updating Google takes me to a page that says this:
—————————————-
We’re sorry…
… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now.
We’ll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.
We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we’ll see you again on Google.
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But the computer is clean.
Any ideas?
-T
Google 403 errors is a known issue and the latest plugin fixes it.
Such tools may be interesting and may help people to read their blog in their mother tongue, but there is also the risk the machine translation provides different (or worse opposite) meaning to what you wanted to express.
For multilingual support, the best way (although I reckon it’s not the cheapest) is to get it translated by human translators.