Automated blog translation is a great idea, and machine translation services like Google Translation and Yahoo! Babelfish do a nice translation job. But after using the Global Translator WordPress Plugin for multilingual blogging, Google turned up 403 Errors with all my web pages. Thousands of ranslation requests are classified as spam and are blocked making caching essential for these WordPress translations plugins. But the errors did not go and many blogs switched to Human Translators.
I also removed the translation flags since there was no sense in continuing with series of 403 pages and confusing readers and search engines too. It was recently I found that my favorite Global Translator WordPress Plugin was updated.
Now it dynamically translates a blog in thirteen different languages (English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese, Spanish, Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch) by wrapping the Google Translation Engine or the Babelfish Translation Engine! Besides the option for a double Translation Engine System, it is Search Engine Optimized and uses the permalinks by adding the language code at the beginning of all your URI. The new in built fast caching system reduces the online connections to the translation engines. Now you can easily customize the appearance of the translation bar by choosing between a TABLE or DIV layout. Besides these there is a long list of fixes.
Fixing 403 Errors
I have been trying this translation tool for the past few days and it is working fine. Just to share my settings – I have opted for Yahoo Babelfish instead of Google Translation services. I have enabled the cache and set it to refresh at over 24 hours (this will reduce the queries to translation services dramatically as it will get the page from the cache). Moreover, I have started with enabling only half the languages (never surprise the search engine bots!) and will gradually increase them. Of course human translators are best, but not free. So you can give this plugin a try and its free.