Google Announces New Translator Gadget for Websites
Written by Jolie O’Dell / September 30, 2009 3:32 PM / 0 Comments
Google is now giving webmasters the ability to prompt users for automatic translations of their pages. With the new website translator gadget, site owners can paste a short snippet of code into their websites and instantly increase their reach to up to 51 languages.
The gadget will automatically detect a user’s preferred language, and if that user’s language settings differ from the content on the gadget-enabled website, a frame will appear over the web page, prompting the user to click a button for instant translation of all text content.
In a post today on the official Google blog, these screenshots were used to illustrate the simple, streamlined process:
Of course, the new feature will only work as well as Google Translate, which project manager Jeff Chin admits is best used to let readers “get the gist” of a page. Still, giving webmasters control over how users see their pages - with minimal effort and no downloads on the user’s part - will likely do a lot to expand both the reach of a given website and the breadth of information available to Internet users around the world.
FOLLOW @RWW ON TWITTER
RECENT JOBS
POPULAR TAGS
- iphone
- microsoft
- search
- mobile
- social media
- trends
- music
- yahoo
- apple
- video
- advertising
- myspace
- youtube
- social networking
- amazon
- firefox
- rss
- semantic web
- friendfeed
- social networks
- android
- security
- mobile web
- privacy
- blogging
- digg
- politics
- data portability
- enterprise
- marketing
- wikipedia
- news
- adobe
- api
- browsers
- flickr
- lifestreaming
- apps
- chrome
- developers
- gmail
- app
- mozilla
- ebooks
- obama
- cloud computing
This seems like something churches in multicultural settings might try. While I believe the translation won’t be super accurate, it should give the non-english speaking web visitor an idea of what you are all about. If anybody tries it, let me know how it goes.