Translate your blog and get thousands of new visitors – here are 3 ways to do it.

Imagine a new wonderful movie. The pre-show spectators are ecstatic. The producers and investors are thrilled and full of expectations of a coming success and profit.

There is only one problem. The language of the movie is Bung, which is spoken and understood by only three persons in Cameroon. Therefore, it has to be translated in order for others to enjoy it.

65% of Internet users do not understand English. You can increase the reach of your blog, get more visitors and make more sales simply by providing translations of its content.

There are 3 main methods to translate your blog or corporate site:

1. Machine- (automatic computer-made) translations on-line
2. Manual on-line translations
3. Manual off-line translations

Each method has its own purpose, benefits and drawbacks.

On-line machine translations

On-line machine translations are fast, cheap and convenient to use. The most common on-line machine translation is provided by Google. Other providers are Promt, Babel Fish and FreeTranslator.

All of the translation services above can be initiated by the site-visitors themselves in their browsers but can also be provided by language selectors installed on your site.

If you are running your blog on a stand-alone WordPress CMS, there are several plugins available for creating easy access for your visitors to your content in their language.

The most popular plugin for WordPress is Global Translator. This plugin connects to and use all four of the translation services mentioned above. You just select which you prefer to use.

Another advantage with Global Translator is that it translates every post and page (as well as categories and tags) on your site and saves them as new posts and pages.

This means that with one mouse-click, you can multiply the size of your blog with the same figure as the number of languages you have chosen to translate into, AND get the additional SEO benefits of search-returns in different languages.

Even if this is probably one of the fastest ways to increase the number of visitors to your blog, the question is if it has any real value. Computer-made translation still are far from perfect and many foreign visitors might quickly stop reading a garbled text that shows up when they click their language flag.

The number of Internet users that can adapt to and de-code the sometimes-cryptic translations made by the machine on-line translators is however increasing every day. More computer-capacity and a steadily increasing number of words in the language databases together with more and more intelligent algorithms, constantly help the quality to improve.

Even if pure linguistic experts are crying in despair, this is obviously the method for the future.

Manual on-line translations

Manual on-line translations are systems that integrate with your site in a similar way the automatic systems described above do. The difference here is that there are real persons instead of software on a computer that do the translations. It means higher costs and longer turn-around time than for machine translations.

There are plugins for WordPress also for those manual translations. One of the most developed, which I am using myself on a couple of multilingual sites, is WPML. This plugin provides an interface with the translation-service (ICanLocalize). The WPML plugin is more complicated to use than the Global Translator above and you have to select your translators and pay for their services through a separate website.

The advantage is however, much more accurate translations, even if the quality very much depends on the translator’s knowledge of your subject. WPML is available not only for WordPress but also for other CMS like Joomla and Drupal. It gives the same SEO benefits of new language pages as the Global Translator.

A hybrid

The GTS Translation plugin for WordPress is a sort of hybrid between the two methods above. It provided automatic machine translations but with the added functionality of manual (even by a community) corrections.

Manual off-line translations.

This traditional way of doing translations is still the most common for larger organizations.

They send the content for their Internet sites in its original language to translators (or translation agencies). The translators do their job and send back the result for manual insertion into the corporate sites.

Email has improved the communication and computer programs are helping the translators, but this way of making your site multilingual remains very time-consuming and costly. It often demands the involvement of several administrative resources in a company. The quality of translations is the same as for the manual on-line method.

Even if still used widely today, this method is bound to be abandoned in the future.

If you want to get thousands of additional visitors, translate your blog now using the method that fits your purpose and wallet.

ByBlogMarketing.com uses Global Translator.

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