Connected Internet - Latest Comments in Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

rruben — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 15:14:22 -0000

eej martin did you had Dutch on your website? I didn't knew that. I am Dutch but I prefer the original posts.

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Ibrahim Faour — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 18:16:25 -0000

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.

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Mark from Bloglyne.com — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 15:46:19 -0000

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...

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Mosey — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 10:56:16 -0000

I think that's the one! Thanks for the link :) Have you had any experience with using it?

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Ibrahim Faour — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 05:43:58 -0000

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

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Mosey — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 18:20:40 -0000

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

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Ibrahim Faour — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:47:08 -0000

Mosey said:

(the translation is typed out by a human)

I don't get it?!!

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Mosey — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:36:36 -0000

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...

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Ibrahim Faour — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 15:29:35 -0000

Great stuff. Youâ€™re the first blog Iâ€™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.

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Mosey — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 14:26:14 -0000

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.

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Everton — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 14:07:40 -0000

I turned them off Mosey-read the earlier comments

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Mosey — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 13:15:49 -0000

I must be blind... I can't find the button to test the translator flag

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

TJP — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 11:59:51 -0000

Great stuff. You're the first blog I've come across that has human-translated sub domains. You just earned 1 more subscriber.

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Martin — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 11:43:45 -0000

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.

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

TJP — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 11:38:59 -0000

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!

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Martin — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 11:26:09 -0000

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.

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

TJP — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 11:11:30 -0000

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.

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Everton — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 11:05:01 -0000

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.

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Martin — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 10:57:06 -0000

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.

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

TJP — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 10:36:01 -0000

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.

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Everton — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 10:04:27 -0000

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 canâ€™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?

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

TJP — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 09:42:42 -0000

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.

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Ibrahim Faour — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 07:26:31 -0000

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

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Everton — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 06:47:20 -0000

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 donâ€™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.

Re: Just How Good Are Translator Plugins?

Ibrahim Faour — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 06:35:52 -0000

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?!

Iâ€™d love to get human translators, but the problem I would have is how would I get 1500 old posts translated? Iâ€™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