There are millions of people around the world that speak languages other than English, yet most blogs I see offer up only English posts. The thought of posting in other languages doesn’t work well with many bloggers as they only know a few languages at most and the time it would take to re-post each post isn’t something we all have the time to do. So what about automatic translation?
Having a plugin to automatically translate your blog into Spanish, Chinese or other languages would be a great way to help gain exposure and readers from other parts of the world. Not only that, but it may also help increase the authority level of your blog.
In doing a bit of research, here are four plugins to help you automatically translate your WordPress blog.
Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro Р$30
– Available in 9 languages and creates nice clean URLs with each language in it’s own two letter directory. IE: site.com/sp/ It even comes with code to insert for any areas that you want to skip translation.
GG_Translate – Free –
– Uses Google and Altavista Babel translation engines. I haven’t seen this in action so I’m unsure how it works but it sounds like it sends all your traffic to external sources.
Global Translator Plugin – Free –
– Available in 10 languages and uses the Google translation engine. The downside to this one is is makes your URLs long and ugly. http://site.com/wp-content/plugins/global-translator/
translator.php?l=de&u=http://site.com/
WordPress Translate – Free –
11 languages and it uses BabelFish for translations. Unfortunately, when you click on any link it sends you to Bablefish’s site so any incoming links won’t be credited to your site.
Out of the four I came across, Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro for $30 is the best option as it creates the cleanest URLs. All plugins seem to do the trick, but keeping visitors at your site and keeping search engines happy is important.
There are both good and bad sides to a translation plugin. The good is that you offer up content to visitors that may not understand English. The bad is that any automatic translation service is ok at best. You also have to keep search engines in mind as you could easy create 5x as many pages on your site. That is if you offered up five different languages.
So what are your thoughts on translations? Is it something bloggers should be offering up? If you are already offering up translation, what option are you using?
