Articles Translations

Hi there,

I’m wondering how the translation process work when dealing with articles ? Let’s say that I’ve written an article in english, I want to translate it into 5 other languages, what would be the exact process to do that ? Is there any fast way or am I going to do that manually ? (I guess than because Ghost is not Wordpress I should find an easy way…)

Thanks for your help !

Regards,

Adrien

You could write a plugin with a translation engine, and also write the translation engine, don’t think there are many open source translating engines out there.
You could try to use the google translate api… but i’m pretty sure that it won’t be accurate…

So i guess the best way would to write it for each language… i have at least never seen a blog/article page that translates entire posts up to perfection with a single click.

to change between languages you would have to write some javascript to toggle between them, and have the means of storing the different translations to be fetched, or you could hide the different translations in separate hidden divs and then pull them out with javascript.

There are two completely different approaches. The pros and cons are not completely obvious, but the good news is that both can be got working quickly.

The first is to put marked text in your different target languages directly in your posts and pages, and then use a software switch to just display the text in the language your user has selected. This gives you complete control over the quality of the translations offered.

How you produce the translation is up to you - you could use machine translation or hire human translators. But the only translation text that will appear is exactly what you put on your website. So for things like technical or legal information you want to make available in several languages - and which has to be correct, this is the best approach.

It’s also worth mentioning that you don’t have to translate your whole site in one go. If there aren’t alternative texts available in the language your visitor has selected the page will simply be displayed in the default language - usually the first language you have put on that page.

You can do the switching with Javascript, as the other reply by antonkristensen indicates. I don’t know enough about Ghost to know if it has any useful features that can hold the necessary state information, But there are off-the-shelf commercial solutions.

Since this is my first post on this forum I don’t expect I can include a link, but look up Multilingualizer. Their site mentions various rivals such as Localize to slag them off. But the approach is a straightforward Javascript snippet which just hides the text for all the languages your visitor has not selected.

The second approach is to be use machine translation and be up-front about it. Provide a Google or Bing Translate box for your visitors to use. This may seem old-fashioned, because users can now easily get sites translated themselves at the browser level by using Chrome, Vivaldi or a browser extension. But your site may attract users that don’t know that.

Unfortunately Google has stopped making its traditional website translate widget available to new users - arguing it’s now up to users to use browsers properly (i.e. get Chrome!) But old Google widget code still seems to work, and Bing does provide new users with web widgets. Try bing dot com/widget/translator

The obvious con of this is that you have no control over the translation quality. But on the plus side you do get to offer support in a very large number of languages.

A less obvious disadvantage with a Google or Bing translate box is that the foreign language text isn’t on YOUR website, so you get no SEO advantage. By contrast if you use some version of the software switch approach search crawlers should find the various language versions of your article, because all these additional words are actually on your site where you put them.

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