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‘On-the-Fly’ Website Translation
Applicability and Usefulness of Google Website Translation
'On-The-Fly' website translation, like that offered by Google or Babelfish, do not produce searchable translated content. These pages cannot be indexed for search engines! It is not the solution if you want to attract foreign visitors to your website. This article explains the issue.
Machine translation is useful to get the ‘ghist’ of an article, email or website. It is practically useless if your want your website to be found through web searches. Your keywords must be indexed in the major search engines for anyone to find you. No one searching the web will ever find you with ‘on-the-fly’ website translation!
While the usefulness of machine translation to render news articles, email and even websites, have their merits, this article looks into the usefulness and applicability of ‘on-the-fly’ website translation.
ApplicabilityMost Internet power users know about the Language Tools offered by Google or Babelfish to ‘translate’ a website into several of the most popular languages on the Internet. Enter the website address in Google or Babelish, and request the languages needed. You will see a machine translated version. Click through the links on the translated site and get a translated version of the pages requested, one at a time. It’s relatively fast.
Let’s look at the applicability of the ‘on-the-fly’ method. To use this method you must first know the website address. Many website owners delight in looking at their translated versions. They can also tell your foreign customers how to see their site in Spanish, German, French or Chinese, or other languages supported by the ‘on-the-fly’ method. The point is, the user must know the website address and how to request the preferred language version in Google or Babelfish. The number of people likely to use this method to see your website in another language is determined by how well word-of-mouth works for you. Someone must tell them. The vast majority of people use search engines to find the information they need. Furthermore, they search in the language of their preference. After all, how many French-speaking people use the Internet to search in German (assuming you can read the language), then, you switch to French when you find something interesting? Practically no one does this!
UsefulnessLet’s take a look now at usefulness of the ‘on-the-fly’ method. A few basic question come to mind. First, does this method help you get ranked in search engines? The straight answer is ‘no’! By someone simply requesting your website in another language in Google does not create your website in that language. Google simply uses an internal algorithm to replace the content with results from the machine translation engine. Google is simply providing a facility (from SYSTRAN the owners of the most popular machine translation engine), to enable your website to be viewed in different languages. Google has their own website in about 117 languages, but they depend on human translators to create the language versions!
IndexingSecond question : Will the use of the ‘on-the-fly’ method result in you pages being indexed for search engines? Again the answer is ‘no’! The translated pages Google creates is not indexable. The URL of the page is altered by the algorithm. For example, if you translate
Other limitations are : 1) Some file formats are not handled, for example if you publish your website with .do files, the machine translation returns the original language version. 2) For the types handled, you get the HTML equivalent. So if your files are in anything .asp or .php you will get HTML, files, not.asp, .php or any other file types back.
Final question is: Can I grab the pages and create my website in different language versions? The answer is ‘yes’, provided you can live with the consequences. Apart form the file name distortions and the HTML-only versions, you must do this manually, one page at a time. Correct the file names and save them to the same directory structure as the original version. If you are doing this with the intention of publishing the new language version to draw visitors in the new language, here is a word of caution. Your metadata is seldom translated! The key words that help visitors find you are not translated with the ‘on-the-fly’ method! On top of this, think of repeating the process whenever you update your website.
Conclusion‘On-the-fly’ website translation has limited applicability. It is practically useless to get your website indexed. If your aim is to be found by other language users on the Internet, you need a searchable website with content that can be indexed for the major search engines. Attempting to capture the results from ‘on-the-fly’ website translation is impractical. The final key question : Which is the most cost-effective way to attract foreign language visitors to your site? For the answer to this question visit read the other articles on this site.