Josh just sent me an email asking if I’d seen the Angsuman’s Translator Plugin Pro For WordPress. I hadn’t but now that I have I’m intrigued.
I’ve talked here numerous times about how I’d love to find ways of translating blogs into different languages so the idea of a plugin that does it into 8 languages (German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese) is very attractive.
Of course the problem with this, and every other automated translation service, is that translation is very difficult with such systems. This plugin uses either the Google or Babelfish translation services which are good for getting the gist of what something in a different language is about but which are by no means fluent (in my experience).
I guess the question for bloggers would be around how high a quality do they want to maintain in terms of what their readers of other languages are reading.
The plugin costs $30 to use (I think it’s reasonably priced) and it seems to be pretty well fitted out in terms of specifications (not that I’ve tried it). You end up with 9 versions of every post on your blog (the original english one and the 8 translations). This means you’re going to be picked up in search engines 9 times which will be very attractive to some.
One note to those using AdSense – read the comments of the post as there does seem to be some problem with getting AdSense ads serviced onto the different translated pages.
I’d be interested to hear from anyone who has tried it. Leave your impressions and experiences in comments below.
