Translation In 42 Languages

July 13, 2009 · View Comments

(Photo credit: discolights444)

(Photo credit: discolights444)

According to Google Analytics, 13 percent of traffic to this blog comes from non-English-speaking countries. Why not more? While I’m American, many of my writings tackle universal themes in marketing and media. What if this blog was translated into many languages?

To solve that problem, I installed yesterday a widget that automatically translates each post from English into 41 other languages. All you need to do is click on the country flag in the sidebar that corresponds with your language. The widget leverages four different translation engines, particularly Google’s.

If you speak another language, let me know what you think about the quality of the translation. Now, we’ll wait and see if this blog starts to receive more non-English traffic.

UPDATE: I dumped the flag-translation widget. A few readers pointed out that country flags frequently don’t correspond to language or language types (like the the Portuguese spoken in Portugal versus Brazil). Instead, I installed Google’s Web translator gadget, which allows you to simply select your preferred language translation. Based on reader feedback in the comments and directly, it seems translation engines are good for visibility and discovery, if only mediocre translation.

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  3. Word Of Mouth & Peer Pressure Among Cows
  4. I’m Testing Twitter
  5. Cheap Online Survey Tools May Have “Ruined” the Survey Landscape, But They Also Present New Opportunities

Tagged as: Search Engine, Translation

  • Marcela
    Max, I checked the Spanish translation (I'm assuming this is the Google Web translator gadget) and it's not perfect but it does make sense. The most common problem seems to be verb tense and word order, but again, it's a fairly good translation, way above the "Tarzan and Jane" translations you usually get with these kinds of things. :)
  • Pedro Arraes
    Hi Max. I don't you if you remember me from Namie's bday party :) I'm from Brazil and we speak portuguese language there. It's a litle bit different from portuguese from Portugal, anyway, I clicked in the Portugal's flag and the translation - of course - is not perfect, but I'm sure it's very useful because it can give the opportunity to several (why not million?) people around the globe to read what you have to say :)
    Congratulations, it's awesome!
  • Of course I remember you! Thanks for your comment. As I noted above, the
    Flags don't always correspond to the languages. Perhaps a simple list would
    be better. Now that I have your email, I'll invite you to our startup's
    monthly open house, Interesting Cafe. Cheers.
  • Pedro Arraes
    Great! Keep me posted. btw, you and Laura still planning to do that Brazilian trip in the end of this year? Me and my wife will probably be there already, if you guys need any tips, just let me know :)
  • kathleenbostick
    Max, you might want to rethink how you display your language options for your machine translation widget. Consider John Yunker's blog post "Flags and Languages Don't Mix" A simple list of the languages is much more appropriate. For example, if I'm in the UK, do I click on the US flag for English? Or if I'm a French Canadian, do I click on the France's flag? Just a thought to make your site more appealing to your global audience. http://bit.ly/BFiYU
  • That makes a lot of sense.
  • The French part is so-so, but clearly the quality of the text has improved dramatically since the last time I played with auto-translation. I wonder if all these pages will be indexed by the engines? Each time you produce one item, you get dozens for the same price, all indexed... would be nice!
  • Yeah...was thinking the same thing. High quality translation? No. But
    indexing mediocre translations could make your content more discoverable to
    people not searching in English (or whatever your root language is). Then,
    hopefully, visitors would be fluent in your root language, and can enjoy the
    original.
  • Makes sense to me, I think I will try that on my personal blog, just to see if it has that sort of effect. Have a great day Max! I am at home with stomach flu. Not cool.
  • Feel better soon! What's your personal blog URL?
  • It's down right now, but hopefully they will fix it soon

    http://marc.poirier.com

    It's a blog on fishing. :)
  • Auto - translating has always been a sore subject for me. When it comes to English-Japanese translation of more than a word, accuracy is not even mediocre. It is extremely close to unacceptable. Usually translating a phrase made of no more than two words at a time is its limit. This one on your page is no exception.
    Of course the inefficiency may derive from the fact that English and Japanese don’t share common etymology. It may very well be possible that we will always need humans to make sense of translating those two languages. (And that enables someone like myself to remain useful.)
    I’d been curious how much better it would work for other languages. Will look forward to read comments by others.
  • Thanks for your feedback. That makes sense. I would presume that
    Chinese/Mandarin would be poor as well. Hopefully the translation
    service will at least make this blog more discoverable, and then
    people can revert to the English root English version. Of course, that
    would necessitate understanding English.
  • Thank you for your reply. I failed to mention above that I do see a huge benefit in having a translator available right there on the same page, regardless of it's shortcomings in functionality. Surely it would show that your articles are meant to be globally inclusive, and that their author is conscientious. I think it's great, for we have to start somewhere. :)
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