Translator Plugin For Wordpress

Angsuman's Translator Pro is a WordPress plugin that provides automatic machine traslation of your blog in 8 different languages — German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean and Chinese.

So what does the "machine translation" mean? It means that the plugin relies on Google Translation or BabbleFish services. Now anyone who's ever tested these services know that the results are far from perfect. Depending on the nature and the style of writing, the translated text can range from almost comprehensible to disastrously misleading. But unless you're rolling the dough and able to afford human translation service that charges per words translated, you take what you can get.

Angsuman's Translator Pro isn't free either. As matter of fact it could be seen rather pricey for a plugin at $30. But the author pledges continuous updates with future version of WordPress and life-time free upgrade of the plug-in for paid customers.

You can read more about how to setup and implement the plugin to your WordPress install on the web site, but there are few things about it that I think are pretty smartly designed. First you can pick and choose which translation engine to use for each individual language choice. You can also exclude a portion of your page from being translated with provided tags.

The plugin also generates a unique and search engine friendly URL's for translated pages. This is very smart. Since search engines will not treat your pages translated to different languages as duplicate content (maybe some day but certainly not now), you actually have a shot at getting up to 8 pages of your blog post indexed.

The gotcha's? Well... it looks like the only real downside so far being reported is that Google AdSense ads will not be displayed on translated non-English pages. It's not clear at this point whether this is a bug or something to do with Google AdSense TOS.