Earlier this year, I looked at adding a plugin to allow for translation of this blog into different languages. I rejected the idea, because the machine translations provided by Google and other services are generally poor (although it’s impressive that they work at all.)
Funny thing, though. Trolling through my blog stats earlier this evening, I noticed a couple of hits had come in from Google translation services. One reader had translated the post they wanted to read into Chinese; the other into Portuguese.
So if Google translation is good enough for my readers, it’s good enough for me. In the right-hand column, you’ll see a couple of rows of flags: click on one to have the blog translated into the language of your choice. It breaks the layout just a little, but it works. I changed my mind and moved the flag icons to the top of the centre column on the page.
The functionality is provided by the plugin Global Translator.
Maybe you should look at Kontrib.com. It’s the first social bookmarking site that allows for multilingual translations – into French, Spanish and Arabic (oh, and English from any of those.) The translation engine is based on statistical algorithms and it’s from Language Weaver – which is a portfolio company of In-Q-Tel (venture capital arm of the CIA). The gist of the pieces is pretty easy to understand even if the text isn’t perfect publishing quality.