Automatic Machine Translations by Google
The Google Translate team has announced a couple of new features that help websites that serve a multi-lingual audience.
First, check out translate.google.com. You can enter a block of text or a website URL to translate. For example, here is this guidesite (onlinebusiness.about.com) automagically translated into Spanish from English. (Mouse over blocks of text to see the original English.)
Google Translate has been around for a couple of years. Today's announcements highlighted three features that help website owners control how their sites are translated.
1. Translate this page now!
You can embed a widget on your site (see image on the right) so your visitors can quickly translate the page they're on. When the visitor selects their language, they are taken to translate.google.com that shows the webpage they were on but translated into their target language.
For an example, check out the Google Webmaster Blog's sidebar. Select the non-English language you want to translate the page to using the Translate widget in the sidebar.
2. Don't translate this webpage (or site)
In the "head" section of your HTML code, you can insert the following meta tag to tell Google to never translate that page.
<meta name="google" value="notranslate">
3. Don't translate this text
Finally, if you just have segments of text that you don't want translated, you can add class="notranslate" to any HTML tag. For example, the following code will never translate the text string "sales at example dot com":
Email us at <span class="notranslate">sales at example dot com</span>
Impressive, but still a long way to go
The Google Translate service supports the translation to or from English from/to Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Ukrainian, and Vietnamese.
That's not to say that automated computer translations are accurate, or even if the translation make sense. The Google Translate FAQ admits to the fact that machine translations don't match the quality of a professional human translator. But it's getting better, and you can help make it better if you speak two languages.
The translation quality isn't as good as I'd like it to be. Can you make it more accurate?
We're constantly working on it. Even today's most sophisticated software, however, doesn't approach the fluency of a native speaker or possess the skill of a professional translator. Automatic translation is very difficult, as the meaning of words depends on the context in which they're used. While we are working on the problem, it may be some time before anyone can offer human quality translations. In the interim, we hope you find the service we provide useful for most purposes.
Also, in order to improve quality, we need large amounts of bilingual text. If you have large amounts of bilingual or multilingual texts you'd like to contribute, please let us know.
-Google Translate FAQ