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Website Translation

Machine or Human?

         

gpineda1

4:32 pm on Nov 7, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



We have a fast growing ecommerce website only doing wholesale, no retail direct to consumers and need to have it translated into spanish, french, russian and other soon. We would like to use a machine language, on-the-fly website translator but not sure if the quality of the translation will be good enough. Does anyone know of a good service for this? We will need to change the graphics also as people choose different languages. If there isn't a good option for machine language translation, can someone tell me if there is an easy way to provide our content to a translator service. The site is a database driven PHP site. Most text is in a database but some are hardcoded in the pages.

Any help, tips or advice anyone has would be much appreciated.

LifeinAsia

5:20 pm on Nov 7, 2007 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Human. Period. Don't even consider machine translation- it will ruin your reputation if you rely on it.

jtara

5:55 pm on Nov 7, 2007 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



And make sure your human translators are native first-language speakers of the target language, and have cultural background in the source language.

Not going to be cheap.

You can get cheap translators on the freelance sites, but I doubt you'll get good translations for cheap.

Monkey

4:47 pm on Nov 8, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Try university students looking for a job

gpineda1

5:12 pm on Nov 8, 2007 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Thanks folks for your comments. I am dreading the amount of work needed to be done to prepare for the translations. Also, I have to rely on a programmer to make my site multi-language ready and we haven't had great success with programmers that can provide quick and accurate results. I guess that is why I want so much for the machine language to work well but not finding great reviews. Thanks!