Oh, the Places You'll Go » Widget Building http://richardmclaughlin.biz Trials and Tribulations Mon, 19 Jul 2010 18:51:01 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 () () No Oh, the Places You'll Go http://richardmclaughlin.biz 144 144 More Widget Building http://richardmclaughlin.biz/more-widget-building/ http://richardmclaughlin.biz/more-widget-building/#comments Sun, 11 May 2008 09:11:52 +0000 McLaughlin http://richardmclaughlin.biz/more-widget-building/

Google Translation toolI 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
]]> http://richardmclaughlin.biz/more-widget-building/feed/ 8