Using Online Translator Tools

Increasing your sites audience by targeting other languages

This is probably the best reason for investigating the various online translator tools and APIs that are available to use. If you can convert your site into other languages it will increase the number of indexed pages in the major search engines and drive users to your site. Make sure you have links to the original content so that even if the translated version is poor the user has the option of reading the article in the source language. We should remember that although most English speaking people have a poor grasp of other languages the same is not true in reverse and as English is the main business language of the world a large percentage of the world outside England and North America can speak and read English.

I have been looking into the various methods for translating content lately for my own sites and although the translators such as BabelFish and Google Translator are not perfect in their translations they are just good enough to allow someone with an understanding of that language to get the overall meaning or gist of the translated text. Although I am not 100% positive about their internal methods I would reckon they work by first translating common phrases and sentences and then revert to word to word translations. I would say this is probably good enough to cover most non-language critical sites however if I had been paid to deliver a site in Russian, French or Chinese because the sites main audience would be reading this language then I would go down the route of using professional translators rather than a free online tool. However in most cases using a free tool is fine for increasing your sites audience.

From my experience over the last few weeks I have noticed the following issues.

1. Trying to translate a whole webpage sometimes causes format issues especially with text on top of other text. For example view this Chinese translation of my unpacker tool using Yahoos Babelfish and notice the formatting issues especially the code examples and the text around the google adverts.

2. Even with a translator that doesn't cause formatting issues if you are outputting code examples even in PRE and CODE tags you will likely face issues with your code getting translated when it shouldn't be. Look at this example of the same unpacker page in Chinese using Googles translator tool and look at how the variable names have been translated.

3. Therefore I found that to translate a whole page in one go wasn't really feasible using one of these tools and I had to break it into pieces to ensure the code examples were not translated. I converted a couple of my online tools into Russian and Chinese e.g

Unpacker tool in Russian and Chinese.

HTML Encoder tool in Russian and Chinese.

Luckily I work in the same office as a lady from St Petersburg and I asked her to take a look at the Russian translation on my unpacker tool. She said that it was about 80% accurate and was the sort of language and grammar that her 10 year old daughter would write. To be honest I was expecting a lot worse and was pretty happy to hear that the main gist of the page could be understood in that language.

4. Names of people and coding terms sometimes cause issues with too literal a translation. For example the name Dean Edwards in Chinese comes back with the word Dean translated into Chinese and Edwards remains in English. This is probably due to the word Dean being construed as meaning the Dean of a college. This is obviously the main problem with word for word translations. Also slang words, curses, youth chatter or abbreviations will be very problematic to translate automatically especially as these sorts of words have a very niche audience in their own country let alone worldwide. I would probably have a hard time understanding the slang terms that kids speak today just as my elders would have with me when I was young so putting these sorts of terms on the web and asking an automated process to translate the word and keep its meaning would be a near impossible task.

5. Carrying out mass translations I found to be quite problematic as these online tools don't like you posting thousands of words to translate individually. However if you are aiming to get your content into multiple languages for SEO reasons then you need to have your translated content delivered server-side or as static HTML rather than using client side tools such as Googles Translator API or Bings new API. This obviously means either doing each page by hand in steps or trying to automate it. If you are going to crawl an online translator tool and don't want to be met by one of Googles "your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application." messages then you need to be careful, not make too many requests too quickly, and change agents and IPs between requests as much as possible. Another option I thought about was to create an AJAX logger tool and then use Javascript and Googles AJAX API to make the requests to its translator object and then log the results. From what I have read there is no limit on the amount of requests you can make as long as you keep to their Terms and conditions and all you need is a Google API Key.

If you are not concerned about having copies of your original content in multiple languages for SEO purposes then offering your visitors the ability to read a page in their own language by using client side tools is a good way to go. Using Googles or Bings API you can translate your content as it loads. I have a little function that allows me to pass an array of IDs into my translator wrapper object which will then loop through the array taking each related elements innerHTML, translate it and then as the result comes back replaces the original content. With this method you can be very precise with what you translate and avoid issues such as translating code examples. Also rather than a long wait whilst the whole content is translated you achieve a ripple effect as the DOM is modified bit by bit. You can see an example of this on my football site with a test page I created which will translate from English to Spanish. Also if you are translating single words such as labels, button values and headers you are probably more likely to get a better translation and you are only requiring a word for word match.

Another online tool I have just added to my main site is a Twitter feed translator which will use Googles Translator API to translate tweets from any Twitter account from one language to another. You can use the form as is or you can directly link to it from your own site passing the name of the Twitter feed you want to translate and then the language code for the language the feed is written in and the language you want to translate it to. For example to view my Twitter feed in German you would use the following URL:

http://www.strictly-software.com/twitter-translator/strictlytweets/en/de

If you would like to see the code behind this form and how it links into Googles API you can read the following article about translating twitter feeds.

Now I am not suggesting that twitter feeds will be the easiest forms of text to translate especially due to the restriction on the amount of text you can use per tweet which usually leads to slang terms and abbreviations being supplied. However as a large percentage of twits (what do you call people who use twitter?) seem to use the application to share links with a short blurb about the links content its probably good enough for accessing tweets containing key #tags of interest supplied in other languages. Plus it enabled me to offer a tool that's puts to use the following features:

-Makes use of Googles AJAX API, especially the translate object.
-The user-interface is very basic with little explanatory text and I have implemented an auto translate of the main labels, buttons and text so that if the user is not English these will be translated as the DOM loads. This makes use of Googles GEOcode data which is supplied for free with their API.
-I also use this GEO data to work out the users location and if they are from the UK I will display a specific banner advert otherwise I default to a Google Advert.

-Use of ISAPI url rewriting to allow automatic translations and nice links to the page.