Translate your website or blog to different languages using Google Translate Gadget
If you run a website or a blog, these days, it becomes almost a necessity to make sure that your web site or blog can be read by people around the world. And that means to make sure your website or blog is available in many different languages other than English. Do you have to learn all those languages to make your website available in all those languages? Of course, not.
Google Translate gadget is a simple web gadget that you can customize and add to your website that automatically translates your web pages to many different languages.
As of this writing Google Translate Gadget supports 35 different languages and the cool thing about this gadget is that it doesn’t take much page real-estate on your web page. Google Translate Gadget has just a simple logo and a dropdown list of languages you can choose from. If you’ve been using any other translation gadgets/widgets you might have to read this article to make sure you are using the one that takes less screen space and doesn’t download 35 different flag images to represent each language.
Follow these steps to add multiple language support to your website or blog using Google Translate Gadget,
Step-1: Visit the Google Translate Gadget page
Visit the Google Translate Gadget page and click on the “Add to your webpage” button.
Step-2: Customize the look and feel of Google Translate Gadget
Customize the Google Translate Gadget to fit to your web page’s needs by giving it a title, width, height, border and language. Hit the “Preview Changes” button to get a sneak preview of your customized Google Translate Gadget.
Step-3: Get the code to add multi-language support to your website
Once you are happy with the customization of your gadget, hit the “Get the code” button to get the HTML code to add to your website.
Step-4: Copy and paste the HTML code
Copy the HTML code that’s generated and place the code on your website where you want the Google Translate Gadget to appear.
That’s all about translating your website into many different languages using the simple Google Translate Gadget.
The next time when a visitor from Spain, for example, visits your website and if they prefer to see your website in Spanish all they have to do is to select “Espanol” as the language on the Google Translate Gadget and Google Translate will translate your website from English to Spanish and will render the Spanish version of your website.
I hope you find this useful to translate your websites into different languages. If you have any questions/comments regarding this please make sure to let us know in comments.
December 19th, 2008 at 3:35 am
Thanks for this useful post Geek !!!!!
I think this is really cool gadget.
My blog is registered in blogger, so I’d like to know if it is supporting http://www.blogger.com ?
December 21st, 2008 at 1:18 am
Kristina – You can get the Google Translate capability to your Blogger blog, even if it is not exactly the same one as I’ve explained in this post. You can get a similar gadget (serves the purpose) to your Blogger blog by following this article, How to add Google Translate on Blogger
December 22nd, 2008 at 4:09 am
Sometimes, machine translation gives bad results because the source text is not clear in a way that a machine can analyse.
‘Global English’ is a method of writing clear text. Global English guidelines are more detailed than ‘plain English’ guidelines. A review of ‘The Global English style guide: writing clear, translatable documentation for a global market’ by John R Kohl is on http://www.techscribe.co.uk/ta/global-english-style-guide.htm. (Although the book’s title contains the word ‘documentation’, the guidelines apply to most business texts.)
December 22nd, 2008 at 8:52 pm
Mike – I agree that machine translations are not reliable all the time. But it is certainly a choice which can be implemented quite simply and easily. At least you can start off with this simple effort and see if things goes well for your readers. If you get more complaints about the translation then certainly you can look into other options.
December 23rd, 2008 at 1:12 pm
There’s some more information here if anyone’s interested
January 3rd, 2009 at 6:35 pm
The gadget works fine, however i am having trouble to customize it for my blog this is http://www.pablosilvioesquivel.com (See the right sidebar).
Just can’t get it centered !
Any help will be very welcome.
Other thing is I use Googles Friend connect too,I have some friends there however I’m still did not see the use for it.
Nice blog!
January 4th, 2009 at 2:05 am
Pablo – I’m glad that you found this useful…the centering issue is purely a HTML issue and I don’t think it has anything to do with the gadget itself…if you still need any help with the gadget please email me.
Google FriendConnect when used to its potential would be a good thing for your website/blog…people can join and invite others to join and spread the word. But the current implementation doesn’t make it very interesting to get involved much.
May 21st, 2009 at 1:26 pm
I would like to know if the translator switches to the language of the browser because if it does not then people wont know what select language means.
September 18th, 2009 at 5:29 am
Can I make more modifications with translator ??? or Am I able to have flags instead of combo??
This translator design not suits with my site. Is there any other way??
September 18th, 2009 at 5:59 am
hi ,
I got solution for maps and its working fine with main pages but its not working with pages which loads via ajax. Please give me solution if u have anything. Its urgent.
Thanks.
December 7th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
Can we have maps instead of Flags Google?
June 15th, 2010 at 2:57 am
This doesn't seem to apply to the new version of the gadget… i wonder if that one is customizable.
July 30th, 2010 at 10:16 am
Am I able to have flags instead of combo?? If someone has the answer will be great.