When it comes to the translation of web pages, or making your website easily available in other languages, ‘Google Translate’ is a very useful tool.
You may not even realize it exists, which would be because it doesn’t on the dot com Google. Rather, it’s available through Google UK, but has all the functionality you need. Simply visit Google UK and use the ‘more’ dropdown to find it.
Here are a few of the features you’ll find with ‘Google Translate’:
1. Translate individual text or any webpage.
2. Translated Search: Search in your native language and find pages written in the foreign language of your choice, translated back to your native language.
Make your webpage easily accessible in other languages by adding the Google Translate gadget.
Aside from the useful options above, you can also get 1-click translations from your browser’s toolbar or check out the Google Translator Toolkit (currently in beta but available).
Is this a tool you are familiar with? Do you know of more useful translation tips, or do you work on sites with multiple languages? Please share your thoughts in the ‘Comments’ below.
Matt Leonard currently directs SEO, SEM and Revenue Management for Cruise Critic, the world’s largest cruise site and part of the Trip Advisor Media Group. You can follow Matt Leonard on Twitter to keep up with his updates.
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This is great… I’m all for anything that makes the information available to anyone regardless of language or location. Thanks for the tip!
This is AWESOME!!! Thanks for the tip Matt!!!!
Excellent tip, thank you for this Google translate information. I have looked at other translator apps but never found one that worked well.
Nice tip – but watch out!!!
I live in ‘little’ Denmark and i’ve seen some horrible translations when using the translate gadget…. When you want to translate to the “smaller languages” Google Translate are not 100% accurate…. yet.
I’ll try to find some examples!
You can go to google.com.translate as well, it can’t translate flash. If you don’t like Google’s try: http://babelfish.yahoo.com/
Babelfish is horrible. I have family in various europeon countries. I can basically speak their lanuages to get by.
Forget about writing. I was using Babelfish until my cousin
said my Italian wasn’t all that “evil” OKAY! I said that’s good
because it translated our aunt was a pear tree. I realized Bablefish is garbage. My nephew said to try Google Translate,
it’s the best. That was an understatement.
Sorry meant google.com/translate
English to Turkish and Turkish to English translations should be improved. I wonder why Yahoo and Microsoft’s Bing Search engine do not offer Turkish translations.
I did some testing with Google Translate and got very poor results. Even short and easy sentences had mistakes in, and more complex sentences did not make any sense at all.
Good translation can only be made by humans!
Hello,
I developed 2 months ago a flash google translate application and it seems to me that is working pretty well, you can not expect to a result similar to human but I think within the next 10 years you will see AI software that will replace many human jobs (including translation)