The team over at Live.com Translation have released a very simple tool that allows anyone to put a drop-down translation menu on their website. Here's a live example, entered with one line of javascript. Give it a click and you can read Read/WriteWeb in a variety of other languages.
When users click on the prompt to translate the page into their language of choice, they are taken to a Live.com page where the original and translated pages are displayed side by side.
I think this is pretty awesome and I added it to my personal site right away. Thanks to LiveSide for the link, it's always the best source for in-depth and breaking coverage of the Live.com world.
Comments
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That is really cool. Instant translation of your site can potentially open you up to new audiences.
Now I just wonder how good the translation itself is. :)
Posted by: Josh Catone | November 9, 2007 12:46 PM
I dropped it into the CPB site and asked for feedback. I'll let you know if the translations work and seem right to people.
Posted by: Curt | November 9, 2007 1:28 PM
I've tried it with just a few simple sentences, asking it to translate from English into Chinese.
The result is as terrible and laughable as Google translate and basically makes little sense.
After all, there still is something about language that you cannot do without the human touch. It's human language, by the way.
Posted by: yam | November 9, 2007 2:10 PM
How do you know the translations are correct?. Refer to #3's post.
Posted by: Don Jones | November 9, 2007 11:01 PM
http://blog.163.com/kwzong@126
i think the effect of live translation is not very good frome english to chinese.
Posted by: Weizong Kuang | November 9, 2007 11:10 PM
I had a go at my personal site and I have to say that at least the English to German translation gives pretty understandable results. Of course it's not perfect but nevertheless impressive. This is a great tool when trying to surf e.g. the increasing amount of Chinese sites that I face every now and then.
Take a look at the results for my site.
Posted by: Timo Paloheimo | November 12, 2007 10:02 AM
http://sphinn.com/story/13638
Sphunn...excellent find. Might want to consider adding Sphinn to your social bookmarking list...many of your blog posts are directly relevant to Sphinn and would introduce even more relevant readers to your blog.
Posted by: Todd Mintz | November 12, 2007 4:19 PM
has anyone tried translating on it?? Its really, really bad. It only translates literally, word by word. Therefore entire phrases are not going to make sense.
Posted by: mike | November 12, 2007 6:35 PM
Very cool!
Thank you for nice info.
But the translation seems so poor.
I'm a Japanese.
A Japasese page of this site is terribel.:-
Posted by: 海外SEO | November 13, 2007 11:21 AM