hreflang: must the different languages show exactly the same content?

1,000 pages in English of my site will show extra content

[guarriman3]

Hi,

I manage a website with 15,000 items, published in both English and German. I've found extra text-contents for 1,000 of the items, but just in English.

I was considering to use some language-translation APIs to automatically translate the texts. But I do not want Google to penalize my pages, if they find that the texts are machine translations.

So I decided to publish 1,000 pages in English with more content than their correspondent 'alternate' in the 'hreflang' tag. This is, the German version of such 1,000 pages will not show the new content.

I was wondering if Google will consider this ok or not. Thank you.

[not2easy]

Google appreciates a better UX so I'd guess they prefer accurate useful content in one language more than keeping things synchronized with automated translations. Quite often those services miss context hints that would change the translation. You may have run across content that has been machine translated and seen how it does not seem natural at all.

If you notice traffic increasing on one language or another that has not got the same content as the English language page, then it could pay to seek a local human translator to help with a good translation.

[guarriman3]

Thank you, @not2easy

Then I go ahead with the extra information in English only.

[robzilla]

Automated translations are a terrible user experience.

What you're describing is fine, each page will be judged by its own merits.

But seeing as most German speakers also know English, and the English pages have content and are presumably more helpful, one might wonder which page ought to be preferred in German search results. It's possible Google will decide to serve the English version.