Mountain View, California — Google on Wednesday announced that it is now empowering Webmasters with a free tool that allows website users to automatically translate online pages into any of 51 languages.
Have you ever wished to have a blog in German but could proceed because you do not know the language? Well, now you can with the new one-click website translator gadget, powered by Google Translate offers to transform pages for visitors if the language settings in their browsers are different from the language of a particular website, according to Google product manager Jeff Chin.
In a post today on the official Google blog, these screen-shots were used to illustrate the simple, streamlined process:
“Automatic translation is convenient and helps people get a quick gist of the page,” Chin said in a blog post.
“However, it is not a perfect substitute for the art of professional translation,” he added.
The application will automatically detect a user’s preferred language, and if the settings on the gadget-enabled website vary from the content being display, then a frame will become visible over the web page, indicating the user to click a button for a quick translation of all text content.
And the most important feature, is that this service is different from Google Translate because you are not translating just one page of your website but the whole website content, site owners can copy and paste a small piece of code into their websites and instantly increase their reach to up to 51 languages. The code is available at the Google Translate page.
But the coolest thing about the service is that if your visitor wishes to go back to the original language of your site, they can easily do so with just a click of the mouse.
Of course, such a service is only as useful as its accuracy. Nevertheless, Google is still giving webmasters the ability to control as to how their website visitors’ see their pages — with minimal effort and no downloads on the user’s part — the service 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.
In August the search engine leader added automatic translation to Google Docs allowing users to translate documents into 42 languages.
The “Tools” menu on Google Docs now includes a “Translate Document” feature which provides a list of the various languages offered, which run from Albanian to Icelandic to Vietnamese.
The Mountain View, California-based company has already built automatic translation features into its popular email program Gmail and into services such as its blog reader as well.