One of the fascinations of using Google Translate to view a website in a foreign language in your native language is to see where it all goes wrong. Now Google has provided a facility for making corrections.

Google's Website Translator is included on more than a million websites, including IProgrammer, and uses machine translation to translate an entire page to one of more than 60 languages that you can select from a drop-down list.

The facility works pretty well a lot of the time but it has its limitations. For example if you are trying to explain a concept in a programming language there are lots of ordinary everyday words that you don't want translated into their usual counterparts.

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Now Google has launched an experimental feature that gives the Website Translator plug-in the benefit of human intelligence. Website owners will be able to edit a translation directly either by typing in their own correction or by choosing from a list of alternative translations for words or phrases, a facility which is already available on the Google Translate website.

But what about all the languages that the website owner doesn't speak?

The new feature also lets website visitors suggest a better translation, a facility has already been tried out between a limited number of languages on translate.google.com. Website owners can then approve suggestions and can also add translation glossary entries, which will improve the quality of future translations.

The feature, which is in beta, has been added to the Google Translate manager site and is “currently free of charge”, an indication that it might be charged for in the future.

More Information

Now you can polish up Google’s translation of your website

Website Translator

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