Meta language for translated pages - necessary?

[klickman]

Another point: Should one be concerned with adding a "language Meta Tag" for pages written in foreign languages or does the Googlebot recognize that the pages are written in another language other than english?

All of my translated pages Meta tags EXCEPT for the title are written in english but the content has been translated into the foreign language.

None of my pages have a META for Language. Would this be recommended or is it necessary?

Thanks for you input!

[heini]

>All of my translated pages Meta tags EXCEPT for the title are written in english

Klickman, so you have the desc in english but the content in another language? Why?

Generally a meta for the language is not necessary, but does not hurt. I'd include it just in case.

[klickman]

These pages are written to be indexed in Google. I understand that that description Meta is not necessary since Google basically ignores it.

So I put emphasis on the title Meta because Google does pick up that tag.

If I'm incorrect in this understand please let me know.

[heini]

Klickman, my take on things: do meta description, craft it well. Also use meta keywords - I for one do not think it's ignored. I think it's counted in the overall text on the page.
If you do not for some reason specifically want to have an english description and put english keywords in I don't see why you wouldn't translate those also to emphasize the visible text on the page.

[pageoneresults]

Welcome to WebmasterWorld klickman!

From the W3C in regards to the Primary Language META Tag...

Abstract
In HTML elements, the lang attribute specifies the natural language. This document is mostly concerned with how to specify the primary language(s) (there could be more than one) and the base language (there is only one) in HTML documents.

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">

The value of the Content attribute of the META element is the same as the value of the Content-Language header in HTTP; i.e, a comma-separated list of language codes. For example:

<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en,fr">

I am now using these on pages that are being translated for a directory. The directory is hosted on a server that I believe is sending an http header that uses the default of "en" as most of our pages are in English.

I'm still doing research on this but I believe its a good idea to include the META on those pages that are translated. I would also ask why the other meta tags are not in the native language of the document. It defeats the purpose.

[bill]

...and don't forget to add the charset encoding, even if your site is in English so that your site's HTML will validate

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
<meta http-equiv="content-language" content="en">