Introduction

Our solution brings together a group of Internet technologies to create a system for translating the content of a website. Our solution takes the content of your website, sentence by sentence, converting it to the desired language and replacing the text on the screen as it goes (no physical alterations are made to your website content during this process).

You can see the translation working right now by scrolling down to the bottom of the page and selecting the desired language.

How is this different?

There are no page refreshes, popup windows, security warnings, third party browser plug-ins, toolbar installations, branding issues, or any other such obstacles with this solution. Having evaluated a number of other online translators, yourwebsitein40languages.com is the most simple and elegant solution yet, and it will not overcomplicate your website with features that Internet users dislike.

We also made the solution work throughout your website by adding a cookie feature. A cookie allows each persons session at your website to be tracked, specifically the language they have selected is "remembered", and so their the chosen language persists as they move from page to page. This saves the visitor from having to choose their language again as they navigate around your website.

The original text of your website is also cached (stored in the computers memory) so that converting back to the original language is instantaenous and the original text of your website always remains intact.

How does it work?

Our solution utilises the popular Google™ Translation service for all language translations.

The yourwebsitein40languages.com software module acts as the conduit between your website and the translation engine. A two-stage process is undertaken when our software service is loaded, as illustrated in the diagrams below:

At stage 1, our service is integrated with your website code by importing the code from our server. There is no further communication with yourwebsitein40languages.com after this point. Our software remains in memory and waits for your website to fully load before activating. Depending on how you want to display the translation options, the visitor will see a list of languages and/or some clickable flag icons.


At stage 2 your website is now communicating directly with the translation engine. When a user visits a new page on your website this process starts again. Pages and scripts are automatically cached, so re-downloading our software should not be required.

How do I install it?

You include a single script reference to the yourwebsitein40languages.com translation module, and then add a HTML tag segment to hold the list of languages (this can be positioned anywhere on your page). Full instructions will be provided.

Can it be customised?

Yes, we can offer customisations. For example, you could have a number of country flag icons that convert your website to the relevant language, as opposed to showing a large list of all 40 languages. For example, the following two clickable flag icons convert between English and Spanish:

If you do not want to use an image, use a simple hyperlink as follows:

• Convert to Spanish 
• Convert to English

Likewise, if you want native language words in the drop-down list e.g. "Español" instead of "Spanish", code will be provided for this, indeed here is a working example:

Native language descriptions: English Deutsch Español Français

Note also that the correct translations of the words then appear in the correct language after translation ha taken place.

We will gladly give you these specific customisations free of charge. Other customisations can be quoted, so please contact us with your requirements.

Are there any issues?

Real-time translations, such the system we offer, are not 100% accurate; the quality of the translations will never be as good as, say, a human translator converting your content word-by-word. However, the quality of translations is sufficiently good enough to allow foreign visitors to get the gist of your website, and that is often good enough to secure a new customer or a recommendation.

Because our service is very affordable, and is a one-off cost, there is nothing to lose and only new customers to gain. We work on the basis that any translation is better than no translation at all.

 

Tips and advice before you buy...

• Please make sure your website is well formed. Web pages that validate are best, and strict XHTML validation is the best to guarantee translation works without problems. Badly-formed pages with existing scripting errors, bad mark-up and mark-up errors will make translation more difficult.
  
  
• Try and use CSS/HTML with DIV container layout for your website structure, and not deprecated HTML Tables.
  
  
• Flash content cannot be translated, so if your website is predominantly Flash-based, our solution is not for you.
  
  
• Avoid IFRAMEs. They hinder translation because each IFRAME is treated as a separate document. IFRAMEs are also bad for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and they work differently across web browsers and are even unsupported on some mobile device browsers entirely.
  
  
• If you are taking content from third parties, e.g. ticker feeds etc, try and write the content from such feeds directly into the page at the time it is generated by the web server ("server-side"). This way, all the content will be fully indexable by all the Search Engines, and it will also be able to be translated.
  
  
• Never use images for text titles - translators cannot convert images.
  
  

Languages Supported:
Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Chinese (simplified), Chinese (traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Tagalog, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.

04 September, 2010 | Language