Installing Google Translator plugin and Traslation Management to your website

bygildabitt

352 followers

Updated 10 years ago

Hi folks, I'd like to share with you what I've learned during my path to getting improvements to my own website.

The translation feature was something I really wanted to add to my site, even if it was not recomended from some of the most knowledgeable people here in WA. They warned me about something real: the translations you can get from Google Translator plugin are very literal since they are made by a machine and not by a human brain. so they can be inaccurate and not very profesional looking, what is so true.

But my reason about adding it even if I was warned about the inaccurateness, was my desire to offer some easy and confortable way to read my information to people in the world whose first language is not English. And what came next was my interest to find a way to improve the translations in the language I wanted specially to be able to reach people, that was spanish. And I learned something really interesting and useful that I'd love to share.

I will walk you to the step by step of installing this feature to your website.

Installing Google Translator Plugin and Translation Management

1. Go to "Plugins" in your dashboard, and click on "add new"
2. Type "google language translator" in the search bar.
3. You will get different versions, but the one I picked was the 5 star rated "Google language Translator" version 3.0.9. Hit "Install now"
4. Once it is installed, go again to "Plugins" main menu, you will see it showing in the list, and then hit "activate".
5. Go to "appearance", and then "widgets" to set up where you want to display that feature in your site.
6. After that, go to "settings", click on "Google Language Translator", and you will have all the options available for your translations, like selecting the languages you want, and a lot more. Scrolling down, you will see the option "turn on translation management?", so check it. You will read this note: " (Managed directly through your Google account. Requires Google Translate meta tag installed in header.)"
7. Hit that link "Google Translate" and follow all the instructions to get the code for the meta tag.
8. Once you got it, copy it with right click.
9. Go again to "appearance" and then "editor". You will see a right column for "templates", so select "header"
10. Scroll down until you see the closing </head>. Paste the code right before it.

That's it!!!!!! You can go to your page and use your translator, and if you see something inaccurate or ununderstandable, you can fix it just placing cursor over the word or sentence you want to correct. The whole sentence will be highlighted and it will show a window with the option "contribute to a better translation".

All this process meant a lot of searching and consuming of time for me to figure out how to set it up. All I want with this blog is make it easier to you if your are interested in translations for your site.

I hope you guys can find a good help here!!!

Cheers & good life to everyone!!!

Gilda :-)