For example, a translation may work between two Indo-European languages, but try Indo-European to Fenno-Ugric, for example. Just yesterday I clicked on a translation link on an English-language site to see how it translates into Finnish, and you really couldn’t make head or tail of the result.

So, even though online translation tools may be “improving”, they are still far from usable. If an audience speaking a certain language is important to your business, better have your site translated professionally.

Thanks for pointing that out, I confess that I haven’t used Google Translate in a while. However I still think the lousiness of the Google Translate widget’s UI makes it a second-tier option.

>While this widget is easy to install, it’s a bit “old web” with its unstyled dropdown and ugly branded button. However, a larger issue is that it boots users to Google for the actual translation, so you lose any linkbacks or tracking data.

Jon: What you described is no longer true for several months. The OLD google translate gadget did what you described in the article- redirect to Google Translate web translation, but for several months, it already use a AJAX in page translation to translate the content inside you page, without any redirect. Maybe you want to try it again.

Now I know, How this language tool can really satisfy more number of audience.

To everyone who prefers professional translations–yes these are clearly much better, but are also much more expensive. Automated online solutions like the one’s described here provide sites the ability to bridge a gap they otherwise wouldn’t. (But if you make a living translating websites, I’m sure you think differently heheh).

To all the people who mentioned other translation options, I’ll take a look at them and maybe write a second phase round up of these (although I’m a bit dubious of Microsoft’s ability to build anything worthwhile :))

@Antoine Thanks for pointing out that Joomla option…anyone know a good translation module for Drupal? In this case ‘good’ means that it runs on the back-end and preferably has some kind of cache.

@z0r Nice point about English->Russian translation. Some language pairs are obviously easier to transliterate than others, but I assure you that these translations are steadily improving

@Brian Harris – That 60% stat was actually based on English, which makes up 38% of internet users according to the figures here: http://bit.ly/6UHJA0 . This means that even you speak English, over 62% of the web speaks a foreign language. But great point about the stat being driven by the settings in the OS/browser. Also, the TranslateThis Button is built in straight JS, not jQuery (FTW!).