Google translation breaks on robots excluded pages

[Lts95]

I've noticed some traffic coming from google translation, and it translates most of my pages adequately, but the order forms (which I have blocked in the robots.txt) are not translated by Google. Does a page have to be in the index to be translated?

[tedster]

No, a page does not need to be indexed and it can even be excluded via robots.txt - Google will still generate a machine translation. I just verified this using a site I work with.

I did find one excluded page that was returned in the original English even though the translator said it was translated into German as I requested. But that was just one of several excluded pages I tried. The others worked with no problem.

[Lts95]

Thanks tedster. After digging a bit more it looks like the translation failure is happening because the order forms are of course being served securely.