Foreign Language pages

I have a website that is getting about 10% of it's hits from google translation tools, I figure that that must mean there are a whole load of none english speaking visitors that aren't finding the site because they don't know the right words to search for in english.

So I figure if I can translate the pages of the website to a selection of other languages I could possibly get a lot more traffic. However I don't want to link to an external site, I want the pages to appear as part of my site, so they can be indexed etc.

I'm fairly proficient in PHP and infact I've written the code for the site myself. However I can't find a way\system whereby I could tag a language specifier to the url i.e "&ln=fr" and my code would translate the page before displaying it. Most of the translation code I have found is either limited to how much one site can call it, or costs. Does anybody know of any other solutions?

Looks you you proved what I was thinking, my problem is I have of 15000 pages to translate, so I really need a way of automating the translation, even if it's done on demand. Then have them look as if its local content.

The other problem I have found is that using an automatic translator the spacing goes to crap, because some languages take more words\space than others to say the same thing. I suppose for seach engines and getting more traffic this doesn't really matter, but for real people it will look crap.

Although I did find out years ago, that if you have content the looks crap for humans but search engines like - more people click the ads

Nice work dude

drumltd said:

Although I did find out years ago, that if you have content the looks crap for humans but search engines like - more people click the ads

Click to expand...

Precisely

If you use Wordpress, try the transposh translator plugin. I've tried others but this one translates the most languages and is updated (the last time I looked).

I write my own sites, got fed up with Wordpress hogging CPUs on servers, (or so the hosts say)

nycdude said:

Take a look at this thread here:

I started a whole new website using this method, translated to the top 10 languages spoken on he planet. The website is only a week old and I'm already getting 50+ visitors from all over the world. My original intention was to make a website with instant PR, but now I'm starting to see much more potential.

Click to expand...

heh, this is very cool. I might have to try this.

drumltd said:

Although I did find out years ago, that if you have content the looks crap for humans but search engines like - more people click the ads

Click to expand...

That's correct, however, they clicks on the ads to get out of there, which is fine, but it's unlikely that they will come back.

So it depends on the type of website and strategy for a plan like that to be satisfactory.

brkseven said:

That's correct, however, they clicks on the ads to get out of there, which is fine, but it's unlikely that they will come back.

So it depends on the type of website and strategy for a plan like that to be satisfactory.

Click to expand...

Quite so at the time I found that out, I was using a mass produced wordpress site, and hammering it to death, then starting another one, once the hosting company complained, worked well at the time to an extent, but my current site is much more long term, so may well not be best approach.