March 26, 2010 
Global Translator automatically translates your blog into 48 different languages and is one of the fastest ways to start engaging thousands of new visitors. This plugin can help increase global awareness of your WordPress blog or BuddyPress social network, as well as allow non-English speakers to understand your content, leave comments, and interact.
Instead of building a mirror site for other languages, this plugin lets you tap into readily available free translation services on the fly with a powerful built-in caching system to reduce the number of requests your site is making to the translation engine. Global Translator makes it possible to get multilingual capabilities for your blog within just a few minutes. Not only does it translate your content but also all of the text-based UI elements on your page. You can choose from Google Translation Services, Promt Online Translator, Altavista Babel Fish, and FreeTranslator.
Features of Global Translator:
- Four different translation engines: Google Translation Engine, Babel Fish, Promt, FreeTranslations
- Search Engine Optimized: it uses the permalinks by adding the language code at the beginning of all your URI. For example the english version on http://www.domain.com/mycategory/mypost will be automatically transformed in http://www.domain.com/en/mycategory/mypost
- Fast Caching System: new fast, smart, optimized, self-cleaning and built-in caching system. Drastically reduction of the risk of temporarily ban from translation engines.
- Fully configurable layout: you can easily customize the appearance of the translation bar by choosing between a TABLE or DIV layout for the flags bar and by selecting the number of translations to make available to your visitors
- No database modifications: Global Translator is not intrusive. It doesn’t create or alter any table on your database: this feature permits to obtain better performances.
Simple Installation
- Upload the folder “global-translator” to the “wp-content/plugins” directory.
- Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress.
- From the main menu choose “Options->Global Translator” and select your blog language and your preferred configuration options then select “Update Options”.
Translation with free services is not necessarily perfect, but it’s adequate for quick browsing and getting around. If your content is of interest to your international visitors, you’ll be able to add to your subscribers, since they will have the confidence of being able to read your blog in their own language. Whether you need just one additional language or want to offer all 48 included, this plugin makes your site instantly more accessible to thousands of visitors.
Sarah Gooding on Google+
I’d be interested to see how this plugin stacks up against the Ultimate translate plugin offered by premium.wpmudev? I’m about to make a move in this area and as a member of ‘premium’ would like to compare the the two.
thanks
What I’d love to see is an integration of this approach with the “mirror site” approach so that when a mirror translation does not exist, the site defaults to automatic translation.
I’ve also thought it would be great to extend automatic translation to comments in order to encourage conversation across language barriers. An exiting front to watch develop.
Hi Sarah,
This may be out of context but I was wondering if you have posted any tutorial on WordPress and Google Apps integration.
Thanks!
No I haven’t but might consider it if there’s some interest. What particularly are you interested in?
K gr8…Google Apps has so much to offer — Google Docs, Chat, Calendar, Market Place and email.
I’m sure users may be interested to have access to these services via wordpress mu/Gmail accounts.
If you could have a post on how to integrate Google Apps via wordpress mu, that I think would be great.
Thanks!
Wow, Sarah, this plugin looks awesome, I am going to be using it on my blog, I hope that the whole World will be able to understand me now.
Machine translations are sometimes very funny :)
Hi!
I would like to know if there is a shortcode for this widget and if so what it is.
Thanks!
Have you tested this on a WPMU setup (or 3.0MS)? I have used this plugin for awhile now and its great but I am worried that if 2 sites have the same page or post name there will be issues since it seams to store all of the cached translated pages in the same folder scheme.
Thanx