Web Site Translated

September 1st, 2008 · by David Bradley

Web site translation You have probably noticed the little flags near the foot of the sidebar on this site, right? You hadn’t? Oh well, whatever, never mind, the search engines have and are currently spidering the cache of more than 400 blogging tips and tricks, hacking ideas, browser tweaks and more that I’ve written here over the last year or so and that have been patiently translated into several languages other than English and deposited as a 35 megabyte collection of cache pages for this site.

I’ve discussed the delicate issue of machine translation on this site before, I’ve even hinted at how translation tools might be used to access banned sites and after a bad experience with translated pages on Sciencebase (a very science heavy site) I’ve steered clear of it. However, correspondence with the creator of an excellent Wordpress translator plugin, Angsuman Chakraborty, persuaded me to give the plugin a second try on the Sciencetext site (less tech jargon heavy). It seems to be working well. At least, there have been no complaints so far about poorly translated phrases. There is a technical issue surrounding the use of this plugin, it can create quite a large cache of translated files, which means when you’re backing up your MySQL database tables it can cause CPU over-run problems at the server. Moreover, just the process of writing a new post can have a similar effect because it generates new stats each time. UPDATE: I spoke to the plugin’s developers and they have now added an option to disable stats, which prevents the CPU issue.

Regardless, if you’d prefer to read this blog in Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, or Spanish, then scroll to the bottom of this page, click the appropriate flag and bookmark that page. Any complaints? Email me or leave a comment on an appropriate post, preferably in English, if at all possible, although because I use the Hyperwords plugin for Firefox, which has builtin translation of its own, I should be able to figure out what you’re saying in any of a dozen or more languages and to think I only learned English, French, German, and Spanish at school.

Merci beaucoup, muchas gracias, molto grazi, danke schoen, domo arigato et cetera, et cetera.

8 responses so far ↓

Laikaspoetnik // Sep 1, 2008 at 10:10 pm

I don’t want to disappoint you, David, but the Dutch translation is difficult to understand. Really had to check the original version repeatedly to understand the post (and it is not a difficult one). Words are translated very literally, some words don’t exist and grammar is gone. Each language has another order of nouns, verbs and adjectives.
If I translate some words back it would be something like:
Search engines = search motors
400 blogging tips = 400 blogging ends (like in pipette tips)
Never mind= never an opinion
I’ve steered clear of it= I drove in the right direction
Got something to say= receive something to say.
Etcetera.

Well it made me laugh, but that was probably not your intention.
David Bradley // Sep 2, 2008 at 8:58 am

@Laikaspoetnik Yes, machine translation is not great for some languages. Google is improving things though…they’ll get there some day.

Those literals you spotted are amazing, especially the I’ve steered clear of it…
Abhishek // Oct 4, 2008 at 7:59 pm

Hi David

If u can give me Google Translation widget,, it will be helpful for me to solve my problem, I m getting hits from overseas also. So it will be easy for my visitors to get knowledge from my site.
David Bradley // Oct 6, 2008 at 7:52 am

Abhishek, unfortunately the translation widget is not free. You have to purchase it and the author will enable it for your specific blog or website. Follow the link in the article.
Abhishek // Oct 6, 2008 at 8:12 am

thanks I will try to purchaase this widget.. but I see some site offers… free Widget.. like reltrick .. I came to ur site from a link on site.. And they provide widget on free…

And Additionally ,, I m from India ,, And my site and Blog is for Indian Financial Market, and Hindi is most spoken language in India.. so I thought if possible I will add Hindi translation widget also.. It will help my Indian Visitor to read easily.
David Bradley // Oct 6, 2008 at 9:45 am

I believe there are free widgets out there, but this one has the advantage of creating cached spiderable content that will rank in the search engines. Any widget that simply calls the translatioon API from whichever site will generate the content on the fly and will not be indexed by the search engines.
Abhishek // Oct 6, 2008 at 10:11 am

thanks… for ur quick and effective reply…

Can u please help me to sort my one problem..

Recently I changed the template.. and I found that I m not able to post comment and I m not getting Previous Post Buttom..

David , can u ellobrate more on this issue.. is error on my side or something the site devloper error..

If any articles on this.. please post a link for taht..

Hoping a quick reply from u this time also
David Bradley // Oct 6, 2008 at 12:04 pm

First off, I’d get rid of the Flash on the homepage, it does you no favors. Also, I’d get a proper CMS system in place rather than using MS Frontpage. But as to the specific problems, I cannot tell, why not revert to the old template and see if it works again. If it does you’ll know there’s a problem with the code in the template.