Back in 2009, Google released Website Translator, a plugin powered by Google Translate, which enabled webmasters to make their site’s content available in 51 languages (now it’s over 60). Google says over a million sites have utilized it to date.
Google has now launched a new feature that lets users customize the translations and make adjustments.
“Once you add the customization meta tag to a webpage, visitors will see your customized translations whenever they translate the page, even when they use the translation feature in Chrome and Google Toolbar,” explains Google Translate product manager Jeff Chin, in a blog post. “They’ll also now be able to ‘suggest a better translation’ when they notice a translation that’s not quite right, and later you can accept and use that suggestion on your site.”
To use the new features, webmasters can simply add the plugin and customization meta tag to their site, translate a page into one language, hover over a translated sentence to display the original text, click on “contribute a better translation,” and click a phrase to choose an automatic, alternative translation. You can also double-click to edit the translation directly.
“If you’re signed in, the corrections made on your site will go live right away — the next time a visitor translates a page on your website, they’ll see your correction,” says Chin. “If one of your visitors contributes a better translation, the suggestion will wait until you approve it. You can also invite other editors to make corrections and add translation glossary entries.”
The feature is currently in beta, and Google still considers it experimental, but if you can actually edit the translations yourself, you should have more control over how your text is displayed, which would be an automatic improvement to the plugin.
Here, you can find tools and resources to add translation to your site.