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:

1. 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.
2. 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.