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How to double your income

Software Translation to 5 languages

         

Nitrous

10:28 pm on May 9, 2005 (gmt 0)



The other day I was laid in bed as I have been for 7 months watching my income slowly declining from about 100 per day to a drop in Feb by almost exactly 50 percent.

I get about 4000 page impressions daily.

This half income situation continued until I changed add positions and colours, and added 2 blocks per page - which ruins the sites layout and user experience but brings back the 100 dollars a day "norm" instantly!

This is across a bunch of very content orientated unique niche hobby sites 10 to 40 pages each. All on different subjects. Seems that the amount per click just halved after a very stable 18 months.

Being ill in bed working from a laptop, I didnt feel like I could create more content just yet, but I could use some software to translate every site into 5 languages. So far I did just 2 but google has not yet indexed anything but their index pages. Still they are already getting found from german, french, italian and spanish search engines! Looks like soon my page visits may double, as already lots of foreign visitors are finding these from forums etc.

Has anyone else thought of doing this or tried it? What were your results?

Might buy the russion, chinese etc packages!
But I have 12 more sites to do first...

jomaxx

10:18 pm on May 10, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



From the Legal Notice on the SYSTRAN website:
The Services are the property of SYSTRAN. You may not, without express permission from SYSTRAN, take the results from the Services and reformat and display them.

I think this refers to their free service. Presumably if you license their technology for use on your website, that constitutes express permission.

Hanslicht

10:31 pm on May 10, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I have had human translators translating my site in to five languages now. Russian and Chinese are coming soon.
I started my site with english focusing on some hard keywords that many other targets about a year ago.
It is much easier to get good searchengine placements with spanish and german than with english - and more good visitors from these countries.
Human translations are very cheap, often you can find students who will do many pages for a credt and some of your paypal bucks.

It has been worth the money and trouble for me to translate.

europeforvisitors

10:37 pm on May 10, 2005 (gmt 0)



Surely if the content is unique and owned by yourself this should not be an issue?

Translations are definitely protected by copyright. That doesn't mean the translator has the right to have the translated content published; it simply means that the owner of the content or a publisher can't use the translation without the translator's consent (e.g., via a work-for-hire agreement, an assignment of copyright, or a license).

Nitrous

12:40 am on May 11, 2005 (gmt 0)



I almost 8-) wish I never started this...
BUT if you are interested in traffic, and clicks, (why are we here?) its def the way to go. Think x2 or maybe x4... income!

Later on when I can afford it I can get REAL translations done by humans. And I will

The copyright issues relate to the free online conversions.

The "translate your website to x nunber of languages" obviously does not. Or whats the point of buying the software then?

Yours tired and fed up with trying to help, Nitrous...

ChrisKud5

1:07 am on May 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



My site deals with a very international topic, and having translations would be very helpful in terms of info for my users and my cashflow.

I hate to post things like this, but could someone sticky message me some info on how and where to start getting the ball rolling with this in terms of any experience people have had with certain translators and how to go about hiring them.

Thanks and good luck

stuartmcdonald

1:21 am on May 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Those with bilingual or multilingual sites -- how are you dealing with feedback/enquiries etc? I assume if you create a Spanish version of a site that was previously in say English, then the enquiries you receive will be in Spanish.

Any experience? Opinions on translating a site but having the "contact us" section in English only and making it clear you only accept queries in English?

asinah

1:55 am on May 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



We translated a part of our our websites in 9 languages. German, French, Spanish and Svenska do well but the Asian languages aren't performing that good.

I would certainly stay aweay from Russian, as the money is to low and our site attracted the Russian traffic that we can do without (scraper).

Nitrous

10:17 am on May 11, 2005 (gmt 0)



Stuartmacdonald,

I used to get about 10% enquiries in other languages anyway, before translating. Thats why I decided to do it.

I just use the same sofrtware (right click choose translate to english) and reply!

Then change the reply back to french or whatever and send it!

shafaki

10:44 am on May 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



To find translators:

Try the Translation Journal for ideas or ask them for translation accurapid.com/journal

An axcellent place you might try for getting translators bid on your translation job is proz.com . Post your translation job there, specify the languages you want it translated into, and wait for translators to bid. Then select the ones with the higher ranking (and the right price). Proz makes a good job making it easy for you to rank them up.

Hanslicht

12:31 pm on May 11, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Hi ChrisKud5,

I simply wrote on my page that I was looking for translators. Tons of users replyed.

For the Asian languages I am using an Indian bureau. They can handle arababic, hindi, farsi, japanese, chinese and even many european languages etc. - and at a very low price.

Do a search for indian tranlators. They can be paided using paypal og banktransfer and the quality is fine.

howiejs

2:12 pm on May 12, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Any online tools to translate content? It looks like many are desktop apps?

Nitrous

2:47 pm on May 12, 2005 (gmt 0)



The one I used was a desktop app.
It does web pages / sites and links etc, as well as title tags etc.

Its quite processor intensive and is hundreds of megabytes in size. Maybe better than online translators?

zjacob

6:35 pm on May 12, 2005 (gmt 0)



Nitrous,

which version of desktop Systran are you using?

Also, are you getting the bulk of the new traffic from less-well known foreign search engines or from foreign versions of the biggies (google.es, google.de, yahoo.fr etc.)?

ChrisKud5

9:48 pm on May 12, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I just purchased the web translator tool. It is a toolbar in IE explorer that you can choose a language and it will translate it into that. It appears that systran translates the page and pages a new output file on your local machine with the translated page.

I am going to do a limited test of this and see how bad the translations are.

On another note, is there a way I can specify a default langauge for certain channels? Say for example I want to have spanish.domain.com all had ads for spanish lanugage pages, ratehr than just the adwords publishers who choose to display all ads on all pages whatever the language?

cyberair

3:56 am on May 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I translated a large content site from english to spanish and created a new domain name for the spanish version. Search engine rankings were very easy to attain, and traffic is about half of my english site.

However, income from Adsense for the spanish site is less than 5% of the english site.

For this reason, I haven't moved into translating into other languages. Anyone have a different experience with another language?

universetoday

8:06 am on May 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I'm really interested in translating my site. I guess it's one of those things that you'll have to try out and see if the Adsense revenue is more than the translation costs. I couldn't bear to inflict a machine translation on my readers. I don't think my existing content management software could handle multiple languages though.

rfung

11:43 am on May 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Anyone who HAS done translations would care to say which languages you have found to work best for you? Spanish and German seem to be at the top of the list? how about spanish, Polish, Italian?

Even if your experience is unique to you, I'd still would like to hear about it!

cat5

11:53 am on May 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



"I think Ronin was making a joke (by giving an example of what translation software is likely to produce). "
indeed ,but if you know the language well you can correct the (LOL) "translated topic"...bzw.port transalated in Google from english to german is :)Tor- instead of Hafen...

cat5

12:03 pm on May 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



"spanish, Polish, Italian? "
UK Germany and Italy are very advanced into bookings via Internet .I focus on those 3 countries.No need for the next 5 years for Polish or Spanish translations...
Why? Spain does not travel much like Greece and France and Italy ,they have the Paradise home ,why should they travel abroad.
As about Poland and in the future Russia,yes but when....in a few years?

howiejs

12:51 pm on May 13, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Lets discuss EPC comparisons

I tested Spanish vs. English
Spanish was 25% of the English EPC for the same test (very limited test)

Roel

7:21 am on May 14, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



BTW, SYSTRAN do not allow their translations to be republished, and I have read that machine-translated pages are subject to copyright protection. In other words, it's theoretically illegal to automatically translate your site and then put that online.


I find this rather hard to believe as this is exactly what there software is supposed to do and what they advertise.

Surely if the content is unique and owned by yourself this should not be an issue?

However (for the benefit of doubt ), I have mailed SYSTRAN with the link to this thread to see their reaction to this.

Got reply back from SYSTRAN and they stated that there is no issue in posting their translations (as was expected) - They also stated that Yahoo, Google and Altavista's Babelfish all post millions of their translations each day with no ramifications.

Obviously this was with the pre-assumption that you own the content.

incrediBILL

7:55 am on May 14, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Yours tired and fed up with trying to help, Nitrous...

This thread is evidence no good deed goes unpunished.

You start an interesting idea about site translations and it devolved into copyright blather.

Should I post my usual DMCA rant now?

My site is so big I don't think I could afford translations unless I start procreating just to sell offspring for medical experiments to fund the translation.

jomaxx

8:55 am on May 14, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



The "blather" was whether or not it is legal to republish the translations produced by the free service provided by Systran. Seems like a valid question to me, especially as Systran's website seems to say they don't want the results used in that way.

It's not even clear whether that was the question they answered. Roel, did you ask about Systran's software packages or specifically about their free service? I mean, obviously Google and Yahoo are paying money for the use of the translation engine, so it doesn't seem like the most relevant example for them to bring up.

Nitrous

1:56 pm on May 21, 2005 (gmt 0)



OK for those that are interested in the results of turning 1 of my many small niche sites into 4 languages by software alone.

So far google has indexed most of it and with zero page rank so far of course...

Suddenly one day, more than double the visitors (happened all at once.) Add impressions doubled as well. And this is continuing upwards steadily for 10 days now.

Income did not quite double, but not far from it.

Click through actually stayed the same. This site gets only about 1000 page views daily.

Also 50 percent of the extra search queries are from foreign search engines not just google. Most see the bad machine translations and just go to the english version. So you gain visitors anyway to the original pages. Some read the translated pages for quite a while though probably trying to understand it!

I also translated another site and it looks to be doing very similar thing, but this one is not indexed properly yet, so wait and see.

Hanslicht

2:08 pm on May 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



If you are serius about multilanguage sites you should build the site as one from the begining.

Remember that every time you make a change in text it has to be applied to all languages. I am having several langugages on my site that I do not understand so updating thes pages is a pain, that will involve many people from all over the world.

My advice is that you have a primarely language for news, blog, contact with users and the frontpage etc. and static content in your prefered langugages.

-And plan you multilanguage site well before you begin. A good CMS can save you a lot of trouble.

I am using a combination of mod-rewrite and dynamic pages to control my languages.

madmatt69

3:29 pm on May 21, 2005 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Funny note. I had a machine translation of a site, and recently hired a freelance translator to do a proper translation.

She sent me the EXACT same translation as the machine translation!

All she did was fix a very small amount of grammatical errors.

I had the translation read over by a few personal friends who speak that particular language, and each said that it's a pretty decent translation. It's all technically correct, thought maybe if you were to start from scratch in that language you would write it differently. But they said it was certainly a valid, readable, usable translation.

So I'm not particulary upset with the translator (she was cheap anyways) but I'm rather impressed with the software. I think it was systran's free service online that I used. If it can make a usable translation, with a few grammer errors that can be weeded out, then I might actually buy their full version.

Though, it could be a total fluke that I got a decent translation.

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