Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Pay up and do it correctly, it's the only way at present.
[edited by: martinibuster at 4:25 am (utc) on Oct. 21, 2006]
[edit reason] spelling. [/edit]
it is a half truth
as OptiRex mentions it needs to be done right and translation services cost quite a bit of money. The other issue is you would need to support those languages, depending on what your site does.
translation and running a multilingual website is not a ton of fun, though it can be very, very lucrative.
You've got to keep in mind that you won't really be able effectively promote those websites. The translation will be very poor if you rely on machine translation, and for that matter you won't even really know what your own website says.
Could you translate articles into, say, Spanish, place them on your existing site and expect them to get picked up by the Spanish versions of search engines?
Tried this. Placed a link to Google translation tool. My site did translate to Chinese and other languages and looked ok, until a couple of visitors emailed me and asked what the &*^% was my page about? Apparently, the translation made me look like a fool... and so yes, Opti is right. Pay and get your site translated by a real live person. Machine translations suck.
A good test would be to cut and paste a block of your text into a machine translator (like Google) and translate your page into another language. Then cut and paste the resulting text and translate it back to your original language. You'd be amazed how crappy it is.