Tuesday, October 14, 2008 at 11:03 AM
When webmasters put content out on the web it's there for the world to see. Unfortunately, most content on the web is only published in a single language, understandable by only a fraction of the world's population.
In a continued effort to make the world's information universally accessible, Google Translate has a number of tools for you to automatically translate your content into the languages of the world.
Users may already be translating your webpage using Google Translate, but you can make it even easier by including our "Translate My Page" gadget, available at http://translate.google.com/translate_tools.
The gadget will be rendered in the user's language, so if they come to your page and can't understand anything else, they'll be able to read the gadget, and translate your page into their language.
Sometimes there may be some content on your page that you don't want us to translate. You can now add class=notranslate to any HTML element to prevent that element from being translated. For example, you may want to do something like:
Update on 12/15/2008: We also support:
Lastly, if you want to do some fancier automatic translation integrated directly into your page, check out the AJAX Language API we launched last March.
With these tools we hope you can more easily make your content available in all the languages we support, including Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
In a continued effort to make the world's information universally accessible, Google Translate has a number of tools for you to automatically translate your content into the languages of the world.
Users may already be translating your webpage using Google Translate, but you can make it even easier by including our "Translate My Page" gadget, available at http://translate.google.com/translate_tools.
The gadget will be rendered in the user's language, so if they come to your page and can't understand anything else, they'll be able to read the gadget, and translate your page into their language.
Sometimes there may be some content on your page that you don't want us to translate. You can now add class=notranslate to any HTML element to prevent that element from being translated. For example, you may want to do something like:
Email us at <span class="notranslate">sales at mydomain dot com</span>And if you have an entire page that should not be translated, you can add:
<meta name="google" value="notranslate">to the <head> of your page and we won't translate any of the content on that page.
Update on 12/15/2008: We also support:
<meta name="google" content="notranslate">Thanks to chaoskaizer for pointing this out in the comments. :)
Lastly, if you want to do some fancier automatic translation integrated directly into your page, check out the AJAX Language API we launched last March.
With these tools we hope you can more easily make your content available in all the languages we support, including Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
32 comments:
wow great information..... G Ragu
I would love to use this if it could be visually customized since big bright Google letters don't exactly fit into my site brand.
class="notranslate"? What if a developer wanted to use .notranslate for CSS styling? What if a developer's already used that on a site?
How about rel="notranslate" !? Use microformats for their intended use.
Please support standards! Instead of ugly class hack you should support ISO 639 "language" zxx for that purpose. In HTML it's lang="zxx".
Also, please don't translate < code > element.
Why isn't "Translate My Page" gadget allowed to be included in Google Sites, eg in the sidebar menu? Official Google html-code usally don't have some security risks.
This is terrific, could we get it a tad smaller please?
I have a quick question.
If we employ this on our sites, and we display Google AdSense, will AdSense discount any valid clicks because a user appears to come from a Google URL?
Its great. But the translated Vietnamese sentences from English are funny, extremely funny!
Hope that Vietnamese Language Specialists will help...
Thank you anyway.
Using the Google AJAX Language API I created a dictionary mashup that combines translations, images and definitions from many sources, helping you to find the best translation/definition. It's currently available in English [http://www.visualdict.net], French [http://www.dictionnairevisuel.net], Spanish [http://www.diccionariovisual.net] and Portuguese [http://www.dicionariovisual.net].
I like it. It's very funny.
"Helping you break the language barrier" is translated into Croatian as "Possibility to break tongue ramp".
I just posted a story about how my granddad have started to communicate with his cousin in the U.S (we are from Sweden) with the help of Google Translate .. use Google Translate to read it .. Swedish -> English ..
http://ohsohightech.se/2008/10/13/google-translate-och-mina-farforaldrar/
The text is blue!!!! very very bad. My web is red
Good hoot! Thanks for the good read, I will definitely return for an update! http://www.epsori.com
It's good that Google is trying to help on getting more people from different cultures to read our content, however this doesn't mean that we are going to get indexed by Google's additional languages or Search Engines in different languages so basically is a good approach but is not necessary the best approach to reach new visitors.
On the other hand is computer generated translation and is a great translation for a free service, but if you're serious about reaching new emerging markets you should try to really focus on a translated website, there's one particular company that I think has a very clever idea and created a hybrid translation method that actually is taken as %100 human translation without the big over head of creating a brand new website, if you want to take a look at it their website is www.motionpoint.com.
Thanks for creating a great and easy to use tool for us with budget limitations.
Doesn't even display in FireFox.
ooops, sorry had JS turned off, my bad...
Great information. The meta tag is very good to control translation
thanks
Great, I'm already using it!
It's nice and small, the problem is that sometimes the translation really sucks!
Good example is English->Bulgarian :)
Any plans for Armenian?
Names of persons and places need not to be translated, but needs to be transliterated i.e. 'Script_changing'. While English to Hindi transliteration the algorithms generally does not work, so name-transliteration Databases are being used. Is google using any such?
hi I just ti say "helllo" for u my friends
@everyone: Thanks for your feedback!
@jordan, kkll2: About <span class="notranslate"> thanks for the heads up! We're already talking with the HTML 5 working group on this issue and look forward to adopting whatever solutions they come up with.
A few other points... not sure if they'll adopt "lang=x" because the text that shouldn't be translated is typically a real language (e.g. English keywords in programming languages), so perhaps it's not well suited.
"rel=notranslate" might be inappropriate because the text isn't necessarily in a link and will likely not be relevant to a link relationship.
Microformats are certainly a possibility. We'll stay tuned to what they develop in HTML 5. :)
Thanks again!
Maile
part of the meta-tag attributes is consider invalid[1], it should be "content="notranslate" not "value=notranslate". Correct me if I'm wrong.
1 http://www.w3.org/TR/1998/REC-html40-19980424/struct/global.html#h-7.4.4.2
If we implement the Translate gadget on our pages, is there a way to monitor the number of users who translate into the various languages? We'd like to keep track of visitors by language to better serve particular language communities (We're a local government agency).
@chaoskaizer:
You're totally right -- thanks for helping the cause.
We support <meta name="google" content="notranslate"> as well. I just updated the blog post.
Take care,
Maile
I can't get the gadget to work on my googlesites page?
Thank you
my brand name has 4 letters and the translator changes my brand name every time, can i change this?
I just tried both meta tags, and google translate still comes up. Is there an alternative or a modern version of the meta tag that would prevent my page from being translated?
I have both English and French on my page. I don't need it translated.
Please let me know. Thanks in advance.
Hi everyone,
Since over a year has passed since we published this post, we're closing the comments to help us focus on the work ahead. If you still have a question or comment you'd like to discuss, free to visit and/or post your topic in our Webmaster Central Help Forum.
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The Webmaster Central Team
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