Pssst: Wanna Hear about something really cool??
Hey everybody,
Did you know that only 30% of the world's population has a 'working' knowledge of the English language? By offering your website and content in other languages, you can increase your potential audience by as much as 70%??
There are traditionally two problems with internationalization, the machine translations (i.e. Google) can translate English content totally out of context. Then, you can have a human translate your site, but you're faced with serious technical issues of duplicate webpages, revising database structures to account for the additional language, etc.
So, yesterday, while I was doing some heavy duty research for re-engineering and converting one of my main sites into Spanish, I came across this site:
Web Lite SWeTE: Simple Website Translation Engine (no affiliate link)
This process uses a small snippet of code on your webpage to automatically determine/load your website in the reader's default language. The actual translation of this page is stored on their server, so you don't have any technical re-engineering of your website. And best of all, it combines the efficiency of automatic machine translation for those little items like buttons, menus, etc. and the opportunity for a human to over-ride the auto-translatiion and translate sentences and paragraphs into something meaningful for that audience. And yep, it doesn't matter if you have a single static html squeeze page, or a major website/content management system that dynamically loads content from a mySQL database; it all gets handled automatically.
Ya know what's even better??? It's FREE !!!!!
This project appears to have just launched this past fall, but the business model, and their approach is completely unique!!!
Check it out.
Talltom
Did you know that only 30% of the world's population has a 'working' knowledge of the English language? By offering your website and content in other languages, you can increase your potential audience by as much as 70%??
There are traditionally two problems with internationalization, the machine translations (i.e. Google) can translate English content totally out of context. Then, you can have a human translate your site, but you're faced with serious technical issues of duplicate webpages, revising database structures to account for the additional language, etc.
So, yesterday, while I was doing some heavy duty research for re-engineering and converting one of my main sites into Spanish, I came across this site:
Web Lite SWeTE: Simple Website Translation Engine (no affiliate link)
This process uses a small snippet of code on your webpage to automatically determine/load your website in the reader's default language. The actual translation of this page is stored on their server, so you don't have any technical re-engineering of your website. And best of all, it combines the efficiency of automatic machine translation for those little items like buttons, menus, etc. and the opportunity for a human to over-ride the auto-translatiion and translate sentences and paragraphs into something meaningful for that audience. And yep, it doesn't matter if you have a single static html squeeze page, or a major website/content management system that dynamically loads content from a mySQL database; it all gets handled automatically.
Ya know what's even better??? It's FREE !!!!!
This project appears to have just launched this past fall, but the business model, and their approach is completely unique!!!
Check it out.
Talltom