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How can I make my site available in multiple languages?

I know that it's not optimal, but I want to make the product information pages on my online store available in a bunch of different languages without paying the major bucks to get a professional translator to maintain them. I know that services like Babelfish let you enter a URL and get the contents translated automatically, but is there some way to hook that into a site directly?

Dave's Answer:

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:

<select name="translate" style="height:18px; font-size:10px;" onchange="javascript:window.location = http://www.google.com/translate_c?hl=en&langpair=en%7C' + this.value + '&u=' + window.location.href;">
    <option value="">Translate This Page</option>
    <option value="ar">Arabic</option>
    <option value="zh-CN">Chinese Simplified</option>
    <option value="zh-TW">Chinese Traditional</option>
    <option value="nl">Dutch</option>
    <option value="fr">French</option>
    <option value="de">German</option>
    <option value="el">Greek</option>
    <option value="it">Italian</option>
    <option value="ja">Japanese</option>
    <option value="ko">Korean</option>
    <option value="pt">Portuguese</option>
    <option value="ru">Russian</option>
    <option value="es">Spanish</option>
</select>

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.

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Categorized: CGI Scripts and Web Site Programming (Article 7880)
Tagged: babelfish, language translation, machine translation
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Comments

This is great, we have a small business in the uk and have many European customers.. It works nicely, how do you automatically remove the google frame?

Posted by: daily at February 14, 2008 8:30 AM

how do you automatically remove the google frame?

Posted by: VINCE at February 21, 2008 1:46 AM

for some reason i keep getting a error on my website have any ideas how to fix it? check it out www.ocsc.info

Posted by: rambow245 at March 16, 2008 7:18 PM

Hi Dave,

It would be really useful if you could figure how to automatically remove the frame.

Posted by: Darren at April 8, 2008 2:25 AM

Hi Guys,

I now know how to remove the frame, it dones by a simple break out script. Include the below in the body of the website you are translating:

It will remove the frame after translation.

Posted by: Darren at April 9, 2008 9:44 AM

for some reason i keep getting a error on my website have any ideas how to fix it? check it out www.ocsc.info
Posted by: rambow245 at March 16, 2008 7:18 PM

The reason your does not work is your using a CMS system which uses GET method to retrieve the page information - as google is not the same URL anymore the GET method is not pointing correctly thus it wont work.

Posted by: Darren at May 28, 2008 2:56 AM

Hello,

I added the code but it doesn't work. I have no idea why, just nothing happens when I select another language.

Can you help?

Thanks so much, Val

Posted by: val at May 29, 2008 6:22 AM

Is there a way to somehow link back to the content in the original language? I could use some help with this.

TIA.

Posted by: Ron at August 15, 2008 11:56 AM

You could add a "back to main language" link or a home link to your domain, this will send the user back to the original language as by translatibng they actually navigate away from your site.

Posted by: Darren at August 19, 2008 2:25 AM

Does any one know how to use a translator in an outlook email so that it converts the email into other languages remaining inside the Outlook??

Posted by: Georgie Imtiaz at September 4, 2008 4:57 AM

Your may also be interested in http://www.conveythis.com which offers a free button you can insert into your layout (kind of like addthis.com) which creates a little pop-up/drown-down menu that allows visitors to select their translator and language of preference without having to ever actually leave the page. It's a pretty convenient and simple solution to this situation.

Posted by: Steven at October 2, 2008 10:31 AM

Does this work for all browsers? I am unfamiliar with java.

Posted by: .oOLimOo. at December 2, 2008 7:00 AM

Thank you for this it is very nice, but I have been trying tabulator code and services all day today, at least 6 hours. It is for my wifes page, that is in French, and needs to be translated, without effort, buy her lady friends.

http://shakti-lanaudiere.ning.com/

I have tried the Ning translator, that basically links to Google Translate, and it works so beautiful, until the translation is complete, then it breaks frame.

I used the Convoy, that gives a choice of several different services, including Google. The ones that don't break frame, really mess up the formating of the page, to the point that nothing is really recognizable.

I also have yours there now, and on this type of site, it does not work. I am really stumped!

Any and all suggestions are heartily excepted.

bri

Posted by: Brian Morin at November 28, 2009 3:30 PM

I just chnaged a little bit of the code. I changed the 'en' to 'fr' without the quotes and added a line for the english, and the sucker is working like a charm!!!!!! Ya hoooooooooo!

bri

Thanks for your beautiful work. - bri

Posted by: Brian Morin at November 28, 2009 3:50 PM

Up one minute down another. Now, for some reason, it is no longer working on my ning site!?

Just thought I'd let you know.

bri

Posted by: Brian Morin at November 28, 2009 5:09 PM

Is this a roller coaster ride or what, I stripped out some code by mistake when I made some changes in Notepad and copied them over to my page.

I won't do the big high thing this time, but I am very happy!

bri

Posted by: Brian Morin at November 28, 2009 5:29 PM

I'm a philosopher not an IT, and I always thought that computers were an exact science. Oh was I wrong.

This code works for a while, great translation, closes frame, and keeps the translation, then BOOM! The translation is gone. But it did work before??? Any ideas?

bri

Posted by: Brian Morin at November 28, 2009 5:59 PM

Hello, I don't know if this contact is working or not (I've tried different blind contacts but never heard back) so I'll try. I googled a question and your URL came up regarding making a website multi language. I mentioned my website up above. I wish to have the "flag" type of set-up on my web pages for language selection for the reader. I've got the site this far but when I get to reading java script /php/and the rest of the alphabet I'm lost, regarding these language options. I'm not a computer techie. I'm on a mac osx 10.4.11/2GHz/PowerPC G5/memory 512 MB DDR SDRAM, whatever that means. Is there someone who could do this conversion to 40+ languages? and for what cost? etc.
Look forward to hearing back
regards
kerry

Posted by: kerry kwiecinski at November 29, 2009 1:14 AM

I have something to say, now that you mention it, but ...

I do have a lot to say, and questions of my own for that matter, but first I'd like to say thank you for all your efforts on this Web site by buying you a cup of coffee!

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