Back in September 2009, when Google first launched the Website Translator plugin, with more than a million websites have added the plugin. While it is being on improvement phase, the company has launched a new experimental feature (currently in beta) that allows user to customize and improved the way the Website Translator translates your site.
Once you add the customization meta tag to a webpage, visitors will see your customized translations whenever they translate the page, even when they use the translation feature in Chrome and Google Toolbar. They’ll also now be able to ‘suggest a better translation’ when they notice a translation that’s not quite right, and later you can accept and use that suggestion on your site.
The Google Translate blog explains the process:
To get started:
- Add the Website Translator plugin and customization meta tag to your website
- Then translate a page into one of 60+ languages using the Website Translator
To tweak a translation:
- Hover over a translated sentence to display the original text
- Click on ‘Contribute a better translation’
- And finally, click on a phrase to choose an automatic alternative translation — or just double-click to edit the translation directly.
If you’re signed in, the corrections made on your site will go live right away and the next time a visitor translates a page on your website, they’ll see your correction. If one of your visitors contributes a better translation, the suggestion will wait until you approve it. You can also invite other editors to make corrections and add translation glossary entries.