I seem to be noticing more and more blogs with a little array of different national flags, clickable to transform the text of a blog instantly into a language of choice. And I know from stats reports that visitors to this site are by no means all from English-speaking countries. So while I imagine a lot of those visitors are fluent in English I’ve been wondering lately whether it would be a good idea, or not, to have automatic language translation installed.
The flags are of course not essential. Sun Microsystem’s CEO Jonathan Schwartz’s blog has a dropdown menu with the languages listed, on the header of the blog.
For WordPress blogs, there are plugins to provide a translation facility. It seems to me that there are at least three issues for anyone thinking about using one of these plugins for a business blog:
- where do you find a reliable plugin
- how do you install it and get it running properly
- how good is the translation?
