Translate This and Translate My Page Functionality with Windows Live Translator

Every now and then I look at visitor logs on the various personal and professional sites/blogs that I administer. It makes for a fascinating experience to see the many places worldwide that visitors come from. I have often wondered about non English speakers and how I could make my writing more accessible to them. While some professional and company web sites have translated versions available, in many user forums and communities across the web there have been requests for a translated version of the pages/posts. Today, on many sites, I have to copy the text on the site, paste it into a translator and look at the translation. It is cumbersome and not very seamless in an otherwise smooth navigation experience.

I am very pleased to say Windows Live Translator solved this problem with the latest feature addition that rolled out this week. Now on the Live Translator home page you will find a new link  "Add the web page Translator to your site". By clicking on this link you go to a page that offers snippets of code that can be added to individual web pages for which you wish to offer translations.

The code generator will create the appropriate widget depending on the source language of your site. Refer to the Live Translator introduction post where Andrea listed the language pairs that we currently support.

So here is what you do to have a link on your web page to translate it:

Step 1: Click on the Add the web page Translator to your site link

Step 2: Select the language your web page is written in (source language)

For example: Since all the articles on my blog are in English, I choose English as the source language

Step 3: The code that you need to copy and paste into your web page's HTML is generated in the box

For example: Since I chose English, the code that is generated looks like this

<script type="text/javascript" src=http://translator.live.com/TranslatePageLink.aspx?pl=en></script>

Step 4: Copy that code and paste it into the page that should offer translation.

For example: On my blog say I want the blog post I wrote about Live Translator to be translated, I go into the blog editor and paste it like so:

 

If the blog or web page uses templates, one could also paste the code into a template - thereby providing the Translate This Page widget on all pages

Step 5: Enjoy an expanded (and hopefully more appreciative) audience!

The end result on my blog looks like this in the case of a single post translation:

 

The end result looks like this if I put it in the template (this allows for translation of every post):

For the more technically minded here is some more information on the parameters that the Live Translator accepts:

<script type="text/javascript" src=http://translator.live.com/TranslatePageLink.aspx?pl=en></script>

where lp is the language pair (such as en_fr for english to french) for source and target languages.

The Windows Live focused community site ViaWindowsLive is making creative use of the Live Translator to make their site available in multiple languages (look on the left bottom of the page). I would love to check out how you might be utilize this new feature. Feel free to post a link to your site in the comments.

-Vikram