Internationalising your blog
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On his money-making mission, Mike has made plenty of insightful posts, and no exception was his recent observation on just how global the internet is. Good one, mate, and then when you highlighted my ban in China, it really got me thinking.
For the 65% of non English-speaking surfers out there, plus a couple of Chinese thought control police, if they do arrive at the door of The Pisstakers, I thought it would be easier for them to make sense of the nonsense, if the blog were available in several of the main languages of the world.
To date, I have been offering Babel Fish for readers of our tech blogs, but their translations seemed more comical than useful, so I went looking for other ideas on integrating machine translations into a blog. Voila! I found some cutting edge options, and some pretty flags.
Check out this post from Digital Inspiration for the whys and wherefores and some code. And this is where I got the code for the multi translation tool from Google in the side bar of the Pisstakers homepage.
You can’t beat a human translator, but unless your international visitors have a sexto-lingual friend nearby, a bit of code will serve its purpose to take most of the mystery out of your blog. As time goes on, the machines should improve their translations from comical to passable and we will become one truly global happy family of blog readers.
Having said that, do you think multi-lingual blogs serve a purpose, or is the content too culture specific and for instance, BAYB makes little sense to readers outside of English- speaking countries?
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esofthub said:
I’ll give the Google translation tool a try. My current Babel Fish box is too darn bulky, and I’ve been hanking to replace it.
Do I think mechanical translation is worth it? Yes. It’s better than nothing when you are on a self-imposed shoestring budget. Human translators cost big bucks! I had some human translation done and it cost me $60 for one language (4.5K to 5K words) — and that was cheap. I wanted more languages translated but the $60 per language focused my efforts. I had others bidders bidding as much as $200+ per language. Ouch!
March 18th, 2007 at 7:00 am