Live.com has released a very simple tool for providing translations for the content of your site. If you look to the right hand sidebar you will see a drop down menu to translate this page into several different languages.
While I don’t profess to be fluent in any language other than English several of my friends are and according to them the translation is of ok quality. The quality seems to suffer based on language though according to my friends who have tested this Spanish, German and French translate well while Chinese, Japanese and Korean not so well. What I really like is that the translated site is put side by side next to the original page so readers can easily refer back and forth between the translated and source copy if there is something that does not make sense, much like the Rosetta Stone.
What is really cool about this tool is that the list is dynamic what I mean is if say a French user came to your site and their default language was set to French for their browser or OS they would not see the Arabic that is the top of the list but rather “Traduirre cette page”. To my perspective this is a great way to open your site up to potentially new audiences.
The code for the translation tool can be found here and is merely one line of javascript. To add the translation tool to this site all I did was edit the sidebar.php file add a div and put the javascript into the div. Now every page on the site has the translation tool.
<div id="translate">
<h3><?php _e('Translate this page'); ?></h3><script type="text/javascript" src="http://translator.live.com/TranslatePageLink.aspx?pl=en"></script>
</div>
If you are fluent in another language translate the page and leave a comment as to the quality of the translation.
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