I have recently implemented Google Translate tools on PokerDIY so that you can browse the site in a few different languages (apparently everyone plays poker these days!) and I thought I would mention it as not everyone knows about this great translation service. Click on the flags in the top right corner to view the site in another language.
I do plan on doing a full-blown multi-lingual site one day when I can afford the cost of a translation service and have the time to implement it, but there are a LOT of poker FAQs and help text that would be expensive to translate and maintain (every upgrade and site change would require a new translation and documenting the change - it's a management nightmare). I therefore decided to implement Google Translate as a halfway house until then. It's also a great demonstration of how the web is changing about how we can use online webservices on the fly (if only the translations were better!).
Pros
- Ridiculously easy (20 min) and cheap (free)
- Translates your entire website on the fly = no upgrade/maintenance costs!
- No messing around with editing language strings
- Handles dynamic content as well as static strings
Cons
- This is obviously not a high-quality professional translation (ie. it wont work for all sites - it depends on your business/target market)
- You have no control over the translations - You are at the mercy of Googles Algorithms (they claim to be improving all the time, but it will be many years until a computer can translate a site in context of it's content accurately)
- You wont benefit from non-English SEO - the translated text is not indexed as it would be in a core solution.
- Images and other elements are not translated obviously, only text in the source of a page
Notes
- This solution is not sufficient for all sites (The Google Translate toolbar might appear unprofessional). My site gets a lot of global visitors (check out the variety of flags on this poker freeroll) and this is better than non-English speakers trying to decipher the text
- You may want to find a friend who speaks the language and have them double-check for obvious errors - you don't want to be sued over a misunderstanding in the content of your site
- There are a couple of nuances I am iorning out - for example, when you switch to a different language and click on Register it siwtches back to English. I think this is due to the postback event instead of a URL
I have only enabled the flags in the upper right for logged-out visitors on the home and poker forums page (this is due to my skin - I'll get some feedback and change it later).
To implement:
- Add a HTML module to your page where you want the flags/language options
- Decide on what languages you want (check if Google Translate supports it)
- Link to Google Translate in the following manner (this should be URL encoded): a href="http://www.google.com/translate?u=http://www.pokerdiy.com&langpair=en|fr (where langpair is the source and target language code)
It is probably best illustrated with a live example - here is the HTML for my flags:
