I just came back from Google and they have updated their translation tools.

Less than a month ago the options were English to 10 languages and those same 10 languages back to English. 20 options, and to be honest I was happy with that. I went on the site when I made my widget and we were up to English going into 14 languages and those 14 going back to English, and the occasional second language.

Today I went to the site and it appears that there are 23 languages – 24 if you count the 2 versions of Chinese. There is also the time saving option that they should have as the default “Detect Language”. This means if you are on a site and you have no idea of the language but like the pictures you can tell Google to translate the page even though you don’t know the language. OK, I am a bit too geeky, but this is really cool stuff.

I have a simple testing process to see if something translates and it worked in all the languages so far. Everyone should do this if translating. Take you text and translate it. Then take the tranlsated result and bring it back into your original language.

Translating “what does this do?” English to French results in “qu’est-ce que cela?”

Translating “qu’est-ce que cela?” French to English results in “what is this?”

Translating “What is the purpose of that? ” English to French results in “quel est le but de cela?”

Translating “quel est le but de cela?” French to English results in “What is the purpose of that?”

The difference is important and it is best that you do something link this. If you are using a translation tool for business, translate sentence by sentence, and then the full paragraph. There are times when the tool will change something based on the context of a paragraph.

All things considered, this is a great tool.

The reason this is so important to me is I am building an article directory in French. I want to make sure that I get things right.

BTW, the languages are:

1. Arabic
2. Bulgarian
3. Chinese (Simplified)
4. Chinese (Traditional)
5. Croatian
6. Czech
7. Danish
8. Dutch
9. English
10. Finnish
11. French
12. German
13. Greek
14. Hindi
15. Italian
16. Japanese
17. Korean
18. Norwegian
19. Polish
20. Portuguese
21. Romanian
22. Russian
23. Spanish
24. Swedish

I was looking for a way to replace a horizontal image on a site with a very similar image that allowed translations. I could not find what I wanted so I made a widget, the tall one on the right hand side of this page. Interestingly, it worked, but was not what I was looking for. So I made another. The second one to the right that has 2 rows of flags. Finally I made the one that appears at the top of each post, that was what I wanted in the beginning, but was dense and could not make it work.

Now these are just widgets, which I assume any programmer can make ( I have not typed a line of code since the early 90’s) and I want to make it a plugin. Time to find a php for idiots book, I suppose.

Anyone wants the widget, let me know. I have just corrected the mistake where I had the word German instead of Hindi. Apologies to Hindispeakers of the world.