Imagine someone visiting your website and immediately leaving it—not because the material was poor, but rather because it was not published in his native tongue. It is a perfect example of a chance lost.
According to statistics, just 60% of web users are English speakers. The remainder could come from countries like Russia, Japan, the Middle East, or others where readers may find it difficult or impossible to understand what is being written in English.
By restricting your website to English (or just one language, for that matter), you are losing out on a substantial portion of the population (or site traffic) who would have become potential clients or regular visitors if the website’s content had been produced in their home tongue.
Systran software powers the majority of machine translation services, including Google Translate, Altavista, Yahoo Babelfish, and Lycos. As a result, you can opt to use either of these services, and the outcomes will be similar almost every time.
Type labnol.blogspot.com into your browser and click the nation flags at the top to see how this type of translation functions. If you click on the Russian page, for example, Google convert will convert the page from English to Russian.
Machine translation is the ideal choice for small businesses with limited or no money for translation. Large businesses with larger budgets and worldwide clients use qualified translators to write the text for their websites in many languages. Many translation businesses can professionally translate your websites for you online, like World Lingo and Systran. While hand translation always results in grammatically correct content, machine translation gives you little control over the grammar of the translated text.
Only a few languages, such as French, German, Chinese, etc., are machine-translatable, but you can easily find a human translator for languages like Hindi, Farsi, Telugu, Arabic, or even Sanskrit.
Another choice is to download the translation programme to your computer, translate the text offline, and then post the translated pages on your website. By using this strategy, you prevent your visitor from asking another website to translate something. The translated text is displayed using the same style and feel as your current website, giving it a somewhat more appealing and professional appearance. Popular software in this category includes Systran, Babylon, and WordWeb.
To increase their readership and subscriber bases, many well-known blogs and websites have translated versions of their English-language versions into French, Russian, Spanish, and other languages.
Adding translation to your website can be done in one of two ways: manually or with the use of software. Here, we’ll talk about both strategies while assessing their advantages and disadvantages.
First, let’s examine the software alternative. A visitor to your website sends a request to a third-party website that hosts the translation software to have the page translated for him. Real-time translation is carried out.