My Thoughts On The Global Translator Plugin
April 19th, 2007 by CourtIn 30 short pages my ebook shows you exactly how to set up a low-maintenance income online using free traffic from Google. You'll learn:
- How to discover keyword sets where the traffic potential is high but the competition is limited.
- How to set up quick, easy, search-engine friendly websites with no programming knowledge whatsoever.
- How to build those websites around high-paying keywords that will give you your first passive online income.
The ebook is free, but there is a catch - you have to actually download it, read it, and implement what it teaches. I'm not giving you this book for intellectual stimulation; I'm giving it to you so you can make money. Hundreds of my readers have used these principles to either create or increase their online income. You can do the same.
Just fill out the easy form below you'll be redirected to the download page. As a bonus I'll follow up with an email mini-course that outlines some of my biggest successes, failures, and key insights I've gained over the years as a full-time internet marketer. I'll send you the first installment right away. And don't worry - all you'll ever get from me is value-packed content. I'll never share, rent, or sell your personal information. Enjoy...and thanks for visiting!
Over the last 24 hours I’ve been experimenting with the WordPress Global Translator Plugin, which will translate your site into up to 13 different languages. Users can choose the language in which they would like to read the blog by clicking the flag of their choice.
Update: To see the plugin in action check out EMoneyMarketing.com and J2Fi.net, and KaizenLog, which are all blogs that run the plugin. In the comments of this post you can read what these bloggers think about the plugin. Thanks guys for your comments!
I’m a born English speaker but speak fluent Portuguese. I actually lived in Brazil for a few years. Since I’m fluent in both languages I thought that I would be a good person to test out the plugin. Before I started my primary questions were:
- How good is the translation?
- Does the plugin slow my site down?
- How hard is it to implement?
- What problems are there with the plugin?
- What are the positives and negatives from an SEO (if you don’t know what SEO is, follow the link for an explanation.) standpoint?
- Overall would use of the plugin add to the overall quality and value of my site and brand?
How Good Is The Translation?
The translation is actually very good. You can configure the plugin to use either Google’s translation service, or the Babel Fish translator from Altavista. You basically just choose which one you wanted to use. I actually thought that the Babel Fish option did a better job.
One thing that I noticed right away is that neither service could translate words with apostrophes very well, i.e. you’re, i’ll, we’re, we’ll, Google’s, and he’ll. I realized that I use words like that a lot in my writing; both the Google and Babel Fish translators left these words untranslated, making some of my sentences hard to understand.
I went back through two of the articles I was testing and changed the wording so that I didn’t have any apostrophes. This improved the translation significantly. The translation was good enough to publish in my opinion. If I decided to use the plugin I would select the Babel Fish option. I could read my articles in Portuguese quite well; readers would definitely understand what was being said.
Does The Plugin Slow Down My Site?
It does slow down your site, but it doesn’t affect the English version at all. My English pages would load just as quickly as they normally would, but the Portuguese, Chinese, and other language’s pages loaded more slowly. This was, of course, due to that fact that the pages are being translated while the page is loading.
I did notice that if I had been to a page once, it would load much more quickly. The plugin creates a cache on your server and saves the translations, so once a page has been translated once it doesn’t have to be translated again for a few hours.
My pages take about 2 seconds to load without the plugin and about 8 seconds with. (On the translated pages.)
Hard How Is It To Implement?
It’s super easy to implement. If you’ve installed a plugin before you won’t have any trouble with this one. You just upload the plugin, activate it, and paste a small piece of code into your blog’s template.
What Problems Are There With The Plugin?
- The translated pages take extra time to load. This problem wasn’t enough to make me think that I didn’t want to use it, if fact the translation time is quite reasonable.
- The plugin threw off the layout of my site. For some reason, my entire site was shifted to the left side of the screen. My layout is centered, but the translated pages were shifted to the left like they were left-aligned. I spent two hours trying to solve the problem but couldn’t see any fixable reason.
- The plugin produced too many page errors. There is a tool that I use to see if my blog is producing too many errors, and without the plugin my site is 100% error free.When I turn the plugin on, my translated pages have over 25o errors. Having some errors won’t hurt you but 250 is quite extreme in my opinion.
SEO Positives
- Your site has 13 times the amount of pages From one moment to the next. This is definitely a good thing.
- The plugin creates different URLs to the translated pages by creating folders for each language.
- Each page publishes in search engine friendly HTML with 100% unique titles.
SEO Negatives
- The endings of the URLs aren’t translated. For example, the URL for my latest article in English ends in: /what-im-up-to-today/. The Portuguese version of the page was found on a different URL that has a very similar ending: pt/what-im-up-to-today/. If you look closely you’ll see that the only difference is an extra pt/ in the middle. It would be a lot more search engine friendly if the title was translated: http://courtneytuttle.com/2007/04/19/que-estou-fazendo-hoje/. I think that having the same endings will likely land most of the pages in Google’s supplemental index instead of the main one.
- There are just too many page errors. I’m hoping that a future version of the plugin can be better in this area.
Would This Plugin Add To My Site’s Value?
It definitely would if it worked better. The plugin could be a really valuable thing for your site, but I have decided not to use it for these two reasons:
- It messed up my entire layout. I was able to find some sites that it worked correctly on, so maybe it’s worth a try for you.
- Too many pages errors. Even on Andy Beard’s blog it produced 115 errors. He’s pretty established and I don’t think all the HTML errors are good for his site from an SEO standpoint.
Overall I like the plugin but will be waiting for a later version. I ordered another plugin that is similar and will be testing it out soon. The creator is supposed to be emailing it to me today.
I’m off to the gym! I’m so glad I don’t have to have a freaking job.
Update: If you found this post helpful, you're going to love our new ebook: The Keyword Crash Course...it's 100% free. Enter your email here to receive the series:
This book contains the methods used by hundreds of my students and readers to create an excellent low-maintenance income online...and it will for your too - if you'll just download it and put it to work.
Save to del.icio.us
Digg This!
Post to Facebook
StumbleItRelated Posts:
My Thoughts On Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro Version 4.0
...
What I’m Up To Today
...
Your Thoughts On The BloggingZoom Copy/Paste Rule
...
Brian’s Threaded Comments Plugin Reviewed
...
I Changed One Of My Main Sites To A Blog
...
Related Posts Plugin And SEO
...
April 19th, 2007 at 10:02 pm
GlobalTranslator is a pretty sweet plugin for WordPress and a few other php-based web pages. This can be integrated into almost any site with very little effort.
What kinds of errors are you seeing when you run GT on your site? I’ve been working with the developer a bit in order to make this work with other plugins and whatnot.
One thing I have noticed is that sometimes you’ll see formatting problems when you use BabelFish, but not with Google.
If you have lots of traffic to your site in other languages, I’d recommend using wp-cache. This will keep recently viewed pages available for a pre-set amount of time. What I like about this is that it keeps pages loading at a reasonable speed for most people, and it’s easier on the Google/BabelFish translation servers.
I like your idea to have the page locations translated, this will take quite a bit of work in the site’s rewrite rules, though.
All this said, there are no perfect translation plugins out there, but I think that Global Translator is one of the best.
April 19th, 2007 at 11:26 pm
Hi Court,
I always have some time for a terrific blog that you have. No worries. =)
First of all, like all translator plugin, they are not perfect.
Translation wise, it’s quite literal. Sometimes you can have a good laugh reading the translation, BUT, this is only natural. So far, the translation I’ve seen, at least for the Chinese version, are acceptable, though not perfect. I’m happy with the results, and am willing to overlook the flaws.
You are right about the error part. Usually I don’t really bother too much about those, since my site is primarily in English.
I will still want to keep the plugin nevertheless as it brings me visitors who search keywords in Google in language that are translated with the plugin.
Yes, so far I’ve got visitors going to the translated(which are already indexed)Arabic, Chinese, Portuguese and Spanish pages. Not bad at all.
I talked about this issue in a post I written not long ago.
http://emoneymarketing.com/internet-marketing/a-visitor-from-google-i-never-expected/
All in all, personally, it is a useful plugin worth keeping.
Cheers,
Jag
April 19th, 2007 at 11:34 pm
Jason and Jag,
Thanks a billion! (I actually asked both Jason and Jag if they would be willing to add to the conversation) They are both users of the plugin, and it seems to be working really well for both of them. For contributing to the conversation I have added links to them in the original post. Thanks a ton guys!
April 20th, 2007 at 12:23 am
Thanks a lot for this review. I’ve been searching for a translator plugin and I think, I will give this a try.
April 20th, 2007 at 5:51 am
No prob Court,
It’s my pleasure. Thanks for the link back. Your blog provide good value to readers, so keep it up!
Cheers,
Jag
April 20th, 2007 at 9:40 am
Marhgil,
You’re welcome and thanks for the comment. I’m glad that I helped in some way!
April 20th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
Hi,
Global Translator uses Altavista Translate or Google Translate according
to your choice.
I would use “automatic translation” if your site is a hobby. For a
commercial enterprise I would hire someone to translate for me.
Why?
The reason being they are not perfect. A computer is doing the work. I
would not like to promote my work of a company using this or other
“automatic translation tools”.
Regards
Kaizenlog
May 20th, 2007 at 5:26 am
Hi,
I know this may not be the most appropiate place for a support issue with this plugin, but I have searched and seached, and contacted the creators of this plugin, but cant seem to get any reply.
I Installed the plugin on my site, but for some reason when I click on a flag, Im just getting a “page not found” and i just can’t figure out how to make it work?
Can anybody help
Many Thanks
Martin
May 20th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
Hi Martin, that problem wouldn’t surprise me at all. I know for a fact that I loaded it correctly and it threw off the whole layout of my page, and produced a bunch of HTML errors. You might be getting a page cannot be displayed because you have even more errors.
In my opinion, this plugin isn’t really worth it!
July 19th, 2007 at 9:57 pm
Great review you’ve wrote.
I have installed for a week but somehow not really know all about this plugin yet.
November 8th, 2007 at 10:09 am
[…] read more | digg story […]
December 5th, 2007 at 12:03 am
Global translator messed up my comments form
March 2nd, 2008 at 6:33 pm
Hi,
Your MySQL sometimes seems to get disconneted and all the sidebar stuff shows error “MySQL has gone away” and it opens up th complete query structure… I think you need to set error_reporting variable to hide these unwanted errors..
June 11th, 2008 at 5:14 am
Hi bloggers.
I have problem with Global Translator plugin actually. I have activated it and put required code into sidebar.php, but when i click on any flag it redirects me to homepage without any translation.
What do you think is wrong here?
(Click on my name to get to website)
July 14th, 2008 at 7:16 pm
Thanks Court,
I’ve been tearing my hair out trying to find out why this plugin wouldn’t work! Installed it on 2 blogs and got same errors as you mention - “alignment gone crazy & 404 error”. Consequently de-activated plugin.
Will wait and see if bugs can be fixed.
John.
July 15th, 2008 at 12:49 pm
I have got email from representative of some translation company telling me to deactivate it since it everytime translation request is made, it refers to that company’s servers and does improperly. Representative also told me that author of that plugin haven’t got permission to create it.
I have got email to my domain’s main email account, so you better check yours to see if you have got message too. Looks like i am gonna look for another good plugin…
October 9th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
Your experience with machine translation seems to have been pretty good. We’re finding that with many languages, especially with asian languages, machine translation is downright terrible - so we’re about to launch a service that provides very low-cost, ‘good enough’ human translation.
The idea is that everyone will be able to afford it, and even companies who right now pay a lot for translation agencies will consider cutting their costs. We think that most of the time, people need translation that conveys accurate meaning, is readable and sounds good - but no more than that. So why should they pay more?
January 28th, 2009 at 6:06 am
thanks, this is a very good option for webmasters!