November 9, 2012 / in General Information / by Jason Terry
One of our newest clients has a membership base located all over the world. They really wanted their web site to be translated into other languages so that visitors could read the content of their site in their primary language. The problem was that they didn’t have the time or budget to create the translations, let alone implement as unique pages in their new website. Google Translate to the rescue!
I knew that there were tools out there that could translate a web page from one language to another, but Google Translate does the translation in real-time. What this means is that you can have Google Translate the home page of a site (including the menu if it isn’t image based) and visitors can click around like they normally would. Each new page that comes up is automatically translated to the target language on the fly. Impressive.
Want to see BlueGurus.com in Spanish? Maybe you prefer German? If you are a hopeless romantic, here is French. Pretty cool right? You can use the drop-downs once you get to Google Translate to switch between languages. (You might have to click between Original and Translation buttons on the right to make the screen refresh if you choose a different language.)
All you have to do is go to translate.google.com and type in your website address in the box on the left, choose a language to translate to and then click the blue Translate button. Presto.
Once you have translated a web page, you can simply copy the URL from your browser and use that URL in a sidebar on your website. For example, you could pick the 3-4 most important languages you would want your site translated to and provide hyperlinks to those translations on your main menu or in the sidebar. Instant translation and a nice feature for your clients that speak languages other than English as their primary language.
Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Esperanto, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Welsh, Yiddish
As a client, the toughest part of the process was writing our website content. He made the rest easy!
"Jason is a pleasure to work with. He came in and in two web development sessions we completely revamped our website. As a client, the toughest part of the process was writing our website content. He made the rest easy! I would highly recommend Blue Gurus!"
Stacy Jones
Founder and Executive Director – Helpers Inc.
