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How can I add "translate into" country flags to my pages?

I just saw your cool article on how to add a pull-down menu letting people translate the pages of my Web site into any of a dozen different languages (see make your site available in multiple languages) but I would prefer to have tiny little flags for different languages and when someone clicks on the flag, the page is translated into that language. Know what I mean? Can you do that and still use Google Translate?


Dave's Answer:

Sounds to me like a delightful coding challenge for me to sink my teeth into. Lightweight, simple, but darn interesting.

As you'll recall from reading the earlier article on language translation scripting, the code is basically a select with an onSelect Javascript event handler. If we want to make this same action occur on the click of a graphic instead, we'll need to use the onClick event and let's try putting that direction into an img tag.

I'l save you the fiddling and just jump to the code:

<img src="french-button.jpg" alt="French" name="translate" onClick="javascript:window.location='http://www.google.com/translate_c?hl=en&langpair=en%7Cfr&u=' + window.location.href;" />

A bit of digging around and it turns out that there's a nice little French flag icon on Wikipedia with the url http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/FranceFlag-ico.png. If we use this then the code looks like this:

<img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/d/db/FranceFlag-ico.png" alt="French" onClick="javascript:window.location='http://www.google.com/translate_c?hl=en&langpair=en%7Cfr&u=' + window.location.href;" />

and, live, works like this:

French

That gives you the gist of what you seek. The trick now is to figure out how to find a bunch of nice icons you can use. For that, I suggest you check out Google Image Search. To change the language of one of these links, replace "fr" with the two-letter language code you can glean from the earlier article's HTML code.

Me? I think I'll keep pushing on this idea and offer up some common language translation options here on AskDaveTaylor. Stay tuned for that...


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Categorized: HTML, JavaScript and Web Site Programming   (Article 7881, Written by )
Tagged: babelfish, french, language translation, machine translation
Previous: How can I make my site available in multiple languages?
Next: Why can't I send mail from my .Mac account?




Reader Comments To Date: 5

Robert "Butch" Greenawalt said, on February 14, 2008 5:39 PM:

I wanted to ask if this was what you were looking for with your flags that work with the translation module from Google. Top left corner of our site just click on the flag and "presto" the applicable translation. WWW.Hyperpcs.Com

Niki said, on June 4, 2008 11:38 AM:

Excellent!!!

LeJuan said, on November 16, 2008 10:30 PM:

You put a french translation link to show us how it's done. Will google index your keywords in french also because of this?

maurizio said, on February 6, 2009 3:50 AM:

Dave,
I use google/transalte for automatic URL translation, however, once the page has been translated, I'm not able to remove automaticly the google top frame as you are able to do.
How did you remove google top frame?
Ciao Maurizio

TheBozzMan said, on November 2, 2011 6:06 AM:

A nice solution, but it doesn't handle multiple translations or remove the Google top frame. Check out: http://easierthan.blogspot.com/2011/11/code-tip-1-more-than-one-translation.html

Starbucks coffee cup I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you, Dave, for all your helpful information by buying you a cup of coffee!

I do have a comment, now that you mention it!











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