DISQUS

Connected Internet: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

  • Martin · 2 years ago
    Well I can tell you how accurate the German translation is. The only good thing I can say about it is that you do understand what the article is about. You can get an idea when you translate the article into another language and then back into English. This is your above text:

    Martin of gHacks is a drawing in human translator its place of assembly into other languages converts, so that he can extend the range of its place of assembly. I of' VE, which is of the plug-in type on the unpleasant Angsuman a translator is based, in order to accomplish the same task automatically on my place of assembly, but, I' of VE never really stopped, over to think on, how exactly the translations are. Can someone explain to me, how exactly my translated sides are? Unfortunately I CAN' t do this, there my language abilities are so terrible, a I didn' to t payment quantity of attention in my French lessons, also as at my school, the one language was takes GCSE, alternatively released, on and I always knew that I would take a second science. I estimate that, you use a second question the translation service at this place of assembly are?
  • Everton · 2 years ago
    That's awful!!!

    Can anyone translate the translated pages for other languages back into English for comparison?

    I guess at least the plugin gets my pages listed on foreign search engines, but I'm begining to think that's pointless if all the reader sees is gibberish.
  • Christian Arno · 2 years ago
    Hi Everton,

    Like quite a few machine translation tools, this one is not great. When I checked the Italian, it broke up the verb phrase 'is recruiting' into 'is+recruitment', and it also didn't manage to find translations for phrases like 'I've'. Having said that, it does serve a purpose - it is free and a non-English speaker could understand some elements they wouldn't understand otherwise. So it probably is worthwhile to have it there, just in case.
    I think we're going to see some significant narrowing of the gap (both in cost and quality) between machine translation tools like Babelfish and professional human translation services like Lingo24 (hands up, I'm part of Lingo24) over the next couple of years. This should come from the fusion of sophisticated statistical translation tools with the professional translation process. Watch this space!

    Cheers

    Christian
  • SoccerSpeech · 2 years ago
    Hmmmmmm
    The funny thing is that it doesn't translate to Arabic at all!!
    And it gives page not found!
    is this kind of racism? :P

    Anyway, I checked your translator once, I think, and as Martin said...you MAY get the idea of the post but not the real idea!

    Hey man, why not asking your writers to write in their language too, if they are not English!

    I don't know if this well affect your Adsense accuracy, but it would be a good idea!
    Just do some analysis to your geographic traffic, and do translate your post to that language.
  • Everton · 2 years ago
    The Worldlingo pages seem to be no longer working - try the arabic version again as I've switched back to Google's engine.

    I'd love to get human translators, but the problem I would have is how would I get 1500 old posts translated? I'd need an army of translators!
  • SoccerSpeech · 2 years ago
    Well, Google considers you as a spyware
    ... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.

    How come it sees you as a spyware this fast!
    Do you have a traffic peak these hours?!
    So a lot of people are trying to translate via google?!

    I’d love to get human translators, but the problem I would have is how would I get 1500 old posts translated? I’d need an army of translators!

    Why don't you first start to translate the most popular articles, and then every new article would be translaed.
    Old-non important- articles can be worked on them later
  • Everton · 2 years ago
    How come it sees you as a spyware this fast! Do you have a traffic peak these hours?! So a lot of people are trying to translate via google?!


    That was pretty fast! I haven't had the Google translator on for a while because of this problem. I think what has happened is a lot of people have been clicking the flags because of this post. Still, it should be able to handle more than one hours worth of traffic......

    Why don’t you first start to translate the most popular articles, and then every new article would be translaed. Old-non important- articles can be worked on them later


    nice idea. My top 10 posts account for about 5-7% of traffic and my top 25 probably about 10%.

    Do you want to do the arabic pages? I'll offer the same deal as Martin. If anyone is interested in taking on other languages then let me know.
  • SoccerSpeech · 2 years ago
    Well, 10-25 posts is not a big deal, and I can handle them, but there`s something you should know!

    Adsense for content is not supported yet for Arabic language, so I don't know if you may get banned by showing Adsense in your Arabic translated pages!

    Also note that, google may have no problems with such translate if your primary language is english(supported).

    Anyway, is it really worth the translation?!
    First do you get significant amount of traffic from arabic regions?!
    Second, I don't think that Arabic users are really interested in such articles, unfortunately. :(
    Just check these links and you`ll know what I mean
    1st link
    2nd link
  • TJP · 2 years ago
    I bought the same plugin as you did, Everton. In fact, I just deactivated it today because I read the following post at Earners Blog.

    I'm losing a lot of pull in the SERPs because I have over 9,000 pages in Google, yet my search engine traffic is pathetic, a bit over 300 uniques a day. So I'm trying something new.
  • Everton · 2 years ago
    I bought the same plugin as you did, Everton. In fact, I just deactivated it today because I read the following post at Earners Blog.


    thanks for the link. I've just read the same post and come to the same conclusion. Every point made made sense, especially given how poor the translations are which means the robots can’t put them into context.

    All that's happening is Google is seeing 'crap content' which because it can't index it properly, is bringing down a site's overall relevancy. Which then has a detrimental effect on the English pages!

    Wow, it's amazing what you can learn in 5 minutes - Thanks TJP.

    I really need to read up more on keyword density etc. For instance, what pages should I exclude from robots etc?
  • TJP · 2 years ago
    This is what my robots.txt looks like:


    User-Agent: Googlebot
    Disallow: /feed/
    Disallow: /feed

    User-agent: *
    Disallow: /wp-
    Disallow: /trackback/
    Disallow: /url/
    Disallow: /forums/
    Disallow: /images/
    Disallow: /adlogger/
    Disallow: /thumbnails/

    I put off added a forum to my site, so that's why I blocked the spiders from it. Gbot visited my site this morning, and read my new robots.txt. So far, so good.

    You should see a HUGE increase in traffic once Gbot ignores all of your translated pages. Since we'll rank better for the english keywords, I'm estimating a 3x increase in organic traffic within 7-10 days.
  • Martin · 2 years ago
    I would not get that pessimistic. Sure the translations are not that good but they can be helpful to someone who is not that proficient in English. I still think that the next big thing will be websites that get translated by users who receive a share of the revenue in return.

    This could work out pretty well for both parties. Results are better and more relevant, native speakers will not think they visited a spam blog aso.
  • Everton · 2 years ago
    I'm convinced now that the SEO benefit of not having poorly translated and trafficked pages outweighs the benefit of keeping a few visitors who's first language isn't English happy.
  • TJP · 2 years ago
    Ghacks - looks like you have the same problems as we do; you just don't know it yet.

    I tried viewing a couple of your translated pages. Well, they are broken. I'm not saying you should deactivate them right away, but just consider that Google doesn't like broken pages. They won't forget those broken translated pages during the next PR update - in about 2-3 weeks or so.
  • Martin · 2 years ago
    TJP you are right, the service is sometimes not working, I changed to Bablefish for now which seems to be working fine. I removed some entries that did not make that much sense, dutch, arabic and some other minor languages and some that do not support Adsense at all.

    I will replace the computer languages with the ones that users translate soon which will get rid of that problem.
  • TJP · 2 years ago
    How much did it cost for human translations? I thought about creating a wordpress plugin that did this on the fly, but it would require too much outsourcing & capital that I don't have.

    If you could share that information in a blog post, I'd along with others would be grateful!
  • Martin · 2 years ago
    Well I do the German translations by myself. Want to translate 20 pages a day which would mean I will need about 100 days to translate them all.

    I share revenue with the users who translate them into other languages. They receive 50% of the Adsense revenue from each article that they translate which could be a nice sum if Google picks them off as nicely as the articles from my main page.

    So, no big secrets. It actually costs time to create the blogs and configure them properly but that's all.
  • TJP · 2 years ago
    Great stuff. You're the first blog I've come across that has human-translated sub domains. You just earned 1 more subscriber.
  • Mosey · 2 years ago
    I must be blind... I can't find the button to test the translator flag
  • Everton · 2 years ago
    I turned them off Mosey-read the earlier comments
  • Mosey · 2 years ago
    Ah... phew hehe :) I only read up to the first couple and decided I'd have a look myself, but just couldn't see any 'click here to translate' link anywhere... slightly distressing :p Thanks for the clarification.
  • SoccerSpeech · 2 years ago
    Great stuff. You’re the first blog I’ve come across that has human-translated sub domains. You just earned 1 more subscriber.

    Well TJP, there`re a lot of websites that offer "human-translated" articles...one of them who start to do this recently is the famous WeblogToolsCollection.

    Anyway, Martin`s idea is just great and can be very useful expanding your audience this way!

    Good Luck with that.
  • Mosey · 2 years ago
    Just had a thought... what's the pluginthat allows sites to display in more than one language? (the translation is typed out by a human)... I came across it a little while ago but can't for the life of me remember where...
  • SoccerSpeech · 2 years ago
    Mosey said:
    (the translation is typed out by a human)

    I don't get it?!!
  • Mosey · 2 years ago
    Sorry, that didn't make much sense at all :p Was in a hurry at the time and wasn't thinking straight.
    I should clarify - the plugin allows the author to write out the document/article in more than one language, instead of having to rely on auto-translators like Google/Babelfish
  • SoccerSpeech · 2 years ago
    I see, I remember this plugin...lemme check my plugins folder....

    Hmmmm, do you mean Gengo?!
    It`s a great plugin..but you need to be careful using it!
    And it`s now compatible (the 0.9 version) with WP 2.1.2
  • Mosey · 2 years ago
    I think that's the one! Thanks for the link :) Have you had any experience with using it?
  • Mark from Bloglyne.com · 2 years ago
    Howdy Everton - I am glad to see that you have taken the automated translator down. This technology is a long way off from working correctly, and I do not think it adds any "real" value to the site, other than confusing folks.

    I have tried out many different machine based translators, because my wife is Japanese, and I would love to be able to speak to her parents without using my very broken Japanese skills. I haven't found anything that works well yet. But, I'm still hopefull...
  • SoccerSpeech · 2 years ago
    Have you had any experience with using it?

    No actually since my first language is Arabic and this plugin doesn't support it, but if it really helps people then I`ll consider make an arabic support for it in the future.

    Anyway, please share your experience if you tried it.
  • Jamie Talbot · 2 years ago
    I'm sure lots of users would welcome an Arabic translation - I know I would. Gengo's support for right to left languages is still a little limited. Any feedback you can give me on where it can improve would be greatly appreciated. Stop by the forum if you get a chance to check it out and have some suggestions.
  • rruben · 2 years ago
    eej martin did you had Dutch on your website? I didn't knew that. I am Dutch but I prefer the original posts.