Thursday, October 1, 2009

Google Widget to Let Your Visitors Translate Your Page

Google released a new translation gadget. Drop the small HTML snippet on your page, and your visitors will then see a bit of interface pop up allowing them to instantly translate the current page’s text into another language. You can give it a try on my sample page, originally in German.

Google says they will only show the widget when the browser settings would require it – i.e. when I put German as my language I wouldn’t expect to see it pop up for a German text – but I was not able to successfully reproduce that. Whenever I visited the German page, even with German content preference settings in Firefox, I was asked if I wanted to translate it to English. (The same problem occurs with Gmail’s translation widget.)

Another thing I found suboptimal was the design of the top bar, which puts the Translate button rather far away from the rest on wider screens, and will have the Google logo placed prominently on top of your page. Other than that, this is a nice gadget... it’s just worth keeping in mind that only a traditional static translation will be indexed by Google, and thus appear in results.

Google Widget to Let Your ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (11)

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