How can I make my site available in multiple languages?

You're right, and you're right. It is the case that machine translation through services like Altavista's Babelfish are inferior to having a human translate them (for a good discussion of why this is the case, please see my earlier article why human translators are better than machine translation).

Nonetheless, if you want something quick and dirty and are willing to accept that the results might be somewhat cockeyed, weird, puzzling or inadvertently amusing, then automated machine translation can be a good option.

Rather than Altavista's service, however, I'm more of a fan of Google's Translation Service (I swear, I'm not on Google's payroll, I just like their products and services!).

Fortunately for both of us, my friend Brad Feld recently added an automatic-translation feature to his popular blog and his programmer blogged about it, including showing his custom code to achieve the translation. Sweet indeed!

Ross (the programmer) shows the following as a self-contained snippet of Javascript + HTML to have a pull-down translation capability:

As you can see, it supports quite a few of the languages Google offers, for better or worse. If you don't want to support them all, just axe a few lines from the code block, so you can, for example, just offer translation into French, Spanish and Italian if you wanted.

How's it work? Well, here's an example with the code actually live:

Try it, check out this very page in Russian or Greek. Cool, eh?

You'll notice that Ross has added some CSS style attributes to the select statement too: if you don't like how he's set things up, you can definitely tweak 'em to get a different result.

Hope that helps you add this capability to your site. Let us know how it works out with your overseas and non-English speaking customers.