Global Translator is a free WordPress plugin that will translates the content of your blog into 34 languages. What makes this translation plugin better than others is that it doesn’t take your readers away from your blog and onto a translation site. Instead, all translated pages are kept on your blog and become new content. The key here is search engines will pick up this new content and index it. This is a great way to add a ton of new content without any writing. Conceivably, the number of indexed pages on your blog can increase by a factor of 34!
- Four different Translation Engines: it has the ability to provide the translations by using Google Translation Engine, Babel Fish, Promt, FreeTranslations.com
- Search Engine Optimized: it uses the permalinks by adding the language code at the beginning of all your URI. For example the english version on www.domain.com/mycategory/mypost will be automatically transformed in www.domain.com/en/mycategory/mypost
- Fast Caching System: new fast, smart, optimized, self-cleaning and built-in caching system. Drastically reduction of the risk of temporarily ban from translation engines.
- Fully configurable layout: you can easily customize the appearance of the translation bar by choosing between a TABLE or DIV layout for the flags bar and by selecting the number of translations to make available to your visitors
- No database modifications: Global Translator is not intrusive. It doesn’t create or alter any table on your database: this feature permits to obtain better performances.
The first time a reader clicks one of the nation flags (say China) at the bottom of the post, it will take them to my chosen translation engine (in this case, Google). The plugin will then go to work and pull the translated content into your blog as a new page. The next time a reader hits the China flag, they will be shown the Chinese page created on my blog instead of being taken to Google. The quality of the translation range from good to pretty ridiculously.
Installation of the Global Translator is more involved than other WordPress plugins. You need to change permissions on several folders so the plugin can write content to them. If you know how to work a FTP program, you shouldn’t have any problems installing this plugin.
Since installing the plugin, Global Translator has created 1,299 new pages on my blog. That’s 1,299 new pages for the search engines to index. Global Translator can automatically provide the translated URLs to the Google Sitemaps Generator for WordPress plugin. After the next sitemap rebuild, all the translated URLs will be added to your sitemap.xml file.
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One of the most common complaint (or excuse) I hear from potential new bloggers is they don’t know how to install WordPress. Terms like FTP and CPanel are like a foreign language and setting up a database might as well be setting up the space shuttle for a launch. Because of the technology barrier, many would-be bloggers never start their blogs...