New: Polish Google’s translation of your website

[tedster]

...we're launching a new experimental feature (in beta) that lets you customize and improve the way the Website Translator translates your site. Once you add the customization meta tag to a webpage, visitors will see your customized translations whenever they translate the page, even when they use the translation feature in Chrome and Google Toolbar.

[googletranslate.blogspot.com...]

[tedster]

This sounds like a great new feature. It's just a beta, but I am looking forward to trying it.

[Rasputin]

I also this sounded pretty good when I read about it, although I'm guessing not many people would actually go to the trouble of correcting it...

...but I don't currently use the 'google translator' on my site, figured anybody wanting to look at it in a different language would already have translator installed in their toolbar (same as I do).

Does adding it to the site actually increase traffic / time on site etc? I don't want to add more javascript unless there is a good reason.

[Robert Charlton]

Ahh... pa-lish, not Poe-lish.

It does sound like a great feature... actually set of features....

If one of your visitors contributes a better translation, the suggestion will wait until you approve it.

I'm intrigued by how they're using human input combined with computing. Ultimately, all this feedback will get folded into Google's "partial" AI for machine translation.

In this case of having you approve a modified translation on your site, I'm wondering what happens in the likely case that you're not qualified to judge the quality, say, of the Polish translation (pun intended). What's the best way in this case to take advantage of the feature. Might it be a wise investment, say, for the site owner to request machine translations and have hired translators provide polished versions?

[n00b1]

The Polish bit got me too Robert. ;).

[BeeDeeDubbleU]

Me tooo. ;)

[deadsea]

I recently expanded the translations of my website from 10 languages to 40. With the 10 languages, I occasionally had users contact me with translation corrections. So when I launched the additional languages, I made a feature where users can submit corrections, similar to how it is done with this Google feature.

As far as uptake, I get about one user a week that corrects a significant amount of text in one language. I also have links to the sites in the different languages, and get SEO traffic on them. So I have a user base. Its unclear to me how many users use Google's "translate a site" feature.

[Lame_Wolf]

It can't be worse than Tesco's translations... [dailymail.co.uk...]

[netmeg]

(Heh I was wondering how a Polish translation of my Michigan site would scan... Maybe in Hamtramck)