Foreign Language Websites

[Blaine Moore]

I bought Translation Gold (aff) a few days ago and I am testing it out on my Run to Win website. Basically, what it does is translate the contents of your website into 8 different languages (plus English means 9 languages available total) so that you can get search engine traffic for non-english queries.

I am hoping that it works well to bring in some new readers. The translation is not perfect (at least, the French is not perfect; I can't read any of the other ones) but it is close enough and should still hit keywords. Hopefully, even if it reads a little funny, it will still provide useful content to non-english speaking visitors.

The way that it works is that it modifies the URLs on each webpage to point at a translation script, which then returns the page in the different language.

One of the main disadvantages to the script is that the translation is done by the author's server. This means that he can update it and fix tweaks without having to bother all of the people that bought his product, but it also means that you are dependant upon his way of doing things. There are a few things I already do not like about it, <strike>such as it also modifying the links to websites on other servers</strike>. You can cache the translated pages so that they do not need to hit an outside webserver more than once (until it expires, which is configurable), but I do not really want to cache the webpages of everybody that visits my site <strike>and then leaves through a translated link</strike>.
{Update: I just got an email from the guy who created it, and apparently it does not translate the external links but does a redirect instead if the link is not on the root domain. That is one less thing to worry about. }

Another disadvantage is that the method that it uses requires opening a remote url as a file, which is a security risk that is disabled by some hosts (such as Dream Host). I was not able to get it working for my First Time Home Owner site, but I imagine that is only a matter of time since it is client side that that part is done. I just need to modify the script to use cUrl instead of fopen(). Right now I am get a resource error instead of the text I am supposed to get. That will have to wait for a week or two, since my wedding is coming up this weekend and I have other things to do that are more important. Once I do get it working or the author provides a script that works on Dream Host, I'd be happy to share it with folk.

It does work at Blue Host without any trouble, though; hence my Run to Win site being able to be translated. My theme does not work perfectly with each language, as the text can be a little long in the sidebars, but other than the character sets that I do not have installed on my computer the site remains usable.

I will update this thread after I get back from my honeymoon and have had a chance to see if my website has been picked up in the foreign languages. It will be interesting to see how much additional exposure I am going to get.

If you want to see the script in action, you can go to my Run to Win now available in other languages article.

[Blaine Moore]

Looking into how the script works, it actually is completely client side. It uses the Google translation API to do the translating, but instead of having a URL that points at the google domain (or IP address in this case) it keeps the person on your domain.

[Yaro]

This sounds really interesting and potentially very useful for opening up a website to many new markets. It depends what exactly you offer but a I see a tool like this being good for sales for certain markets, especially products.

Are you able to track what languages customers are coming from?

[Blaine Moore]

This sounds really interesting and potentially very useful for opening up a website to many new markets. It depends what exactly you offer but a I see a tool like this being good for sales for certain markets, especially products.

Are you able to track what languages customers are coming from?
[/b]

Right now, I've only seen curiousity clicks on the article stating that it is available. Once it gets indexed, then I should be able to tell based on query terms or based on the page that they go to.

Right now every page goes through a translate page (french.php?u=URL etc), so I think I am going to rewrite the script when I get home either look like its on a different domain (fr.news.runtowin.com or es.news.runtowin.com etc) or else have its own path that gets parsed in my htaccess file like every other page currently does. Probably the latter as being less work in the long run.

That will make it a little easier to track and will hopefully provide even better search engine results, as the url will not be dependant upon the query string like it is now (from a search engine or end user view at any rate)

[Yaro]

Sounds great Blaine - you seem to be a capable web developer?

[Blaine Moore]

Sounds great Blaine - you seem to be a capable web developer?
[/b]

My first real job was developing in asp for a dot com back at the turn of the century (hah, that sounds so great...) and since then I had a short stint doing Q/A for electronic arts, and for the last 4 years have been working for a check printing company as the system administrator. And by system administrator, I am the help desk, the web developer (though we hired somebody to take those tasks over, but now we've grown enough that I am back to helping him with those), the application developer, the sys admin, the network guy, the database admin...basically anything that touches on computers and half the things that don't.

So yeah, I am fairly capable. I have been using a LAMP setup (linux/apache/mysql/php) for most of my personal development for the last 8 years or so, even though in my "professional" work I have always worked in Microsoft environments.

Run to Win was originally going to be an online training log; I only started a blog because I wanted something there and I did not have the time to do the development for the training log. It is easier to spend a few extra hours writing content than writing code after spending 8 to 10 hours writing code earlier in the day. Now, I probably will not write a training log since there are plenty of them out there and the blog is getting me enough exposure; instead, I will probably just write some one-off tools to give away or sell. Or have somebody build them for me.

[JamesET]

I have been using Translation Gold for a few weeks now on nearly all my sites (it's easy to set up).
The list of regional language Googles refering to my sites seems to still be growing.

I've noticed a few minor annoyances:
In some cases (not which it is- the Wordpress sites or regular websites) the site description in the search engines is not translated with the page name.
A few adsense ads seem to be showing up in other languages on the English pages. Not sure if it has anything to do with Translation Gold or not.

I think it would be nice if it made a permanent page that could be edited later if you wanted to.

I'll be curious to see what you come up with Blaine.
james

[Blaine Moore]

I have been using Translation Gold for a few weeks now on nearly all my sites (it's easy to set up).
The list of regional language Googles refering to my sites seems to still be growing.

I've noticed a few minor annoyances:
In some cases (not which it is- the Wordpress sites or regular websites) the site description in the search engines is not translated with the page name.
A few adsense ads seem to be showing up in other languages on the English pages. Not sure if it has anything to do with Translation Gold or not.

I think it would be nice if it made a permanent page that could be edited later if you wanted to.

I'll be curious to see what you come up with Blaine.
james
[/b]

Well, depending upon how you have it set it up, it does create a permanent page that you can edit later. Your tcache directory is full of them, as long as you have it set to always use your cache. On a site where the pages never change, that would make sense; on my wordpress site, I have it retranslate every day so that the index and comments are always close to current.

You gave me an idea though; I might change the cache so that if you edit it it will not retranslate that page (perhaps giving the md5 hash file name an html extension or something?)...then you could make changes to individual pages and have them stay that way.

I already want to have a way to always translate say my index page but to only translate once some other pages, etc. But those will come after the wedding.

[Pidea]

My eBay affiliate site (http://www.missing-auctions.com) uses the free GeoIP library to determine where in the world the user is and then pre-selects their nearest eBay site. Something like this translation script would be pretty cool because I could use it to translate the whole of the page rather than just provide the category list in the users native tongue.

There again Blaine, perhaps you could build a simple page with a form on it that we could paste text into for translation

Any ideas if it provides more accurate translations that the Babelfish service ?

[Blaine Moore]

There again Blaine, perhaps you could build a simple page with a form on it that we could paste text into for translation

Any ideas if it provides more accurate translations that the Babelfish service ?
[/b]

It uses the google translation service. I'm not sure how well they compare; I think it is better but only marginally.