Add a translation widget to your web page

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Google, Microsoft

Add a translation widget to your web page

by Brad Linder Nov 9th 2007

The beauty of the web is that your personal homepage could have an international audience. Of course, visitors from Russia, Korea, or Japan might have a hard time reading your English-only website.

There are plenty of tools out there that let proactive internet users translate a web page. But you can also make it easy on visitors by adding translation widgets to your blog or web site.

This week Microsoft released a widget for Windows Live Translator. And it's pretty slick. All you have to do is copy a tiny bit of code to your web page, and a drop down box will show up on your site letting visitors know that they can "translate this site" in a variety of languages including German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese.

If you're more of a Google person, we also dug up a widget that uses Google Translate, but it's a bit less elegant. This widget will simply add a series of links to your page that let visitors know they can translate the site into Arabic, German, Portuguese, Chinese, and so on.

What tricks do you have for making your web site internationally friendly?

Update: Google has launched an official translation widget for your web page as well. Their widget doesn't blend into all web sites very well just yet (it assumes you have a white background), but does offer a faster translation.

[via Bink.nu]

Tags: google-translate, translate, translation, widgets, windows-live-translator

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

michael said 4:43PM on 11-09-2007

I checked it out, and it looks awesome. I'll definitely be putting this on my personal blog site as soon as I can.

I also took a look at Live Translator site myself. Pretty nifty. The way they translate a webpage in parallel panes is pretty neat.

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