Today, the Search Engine Roundtable reported that webmasters have worked out a way to prevent your website visitors from using Google Translate to translate your website automatically. Google offers an easy way to prevent the “Translate this page” link from showing up in your search results. If you’re not a tech wizard, just get your webmaster to add a “no translate” meta tag to your site. You can also leave certain pages or components of your site open to translation. In this case, the meta tag would only be applied to the pages you want to keep in the source language.
Of course, there are many reasons why this might be a handy option for companies or organizations. If you currently operate a bilingual or multilingual website, most likely you would want the quality of your (paid) translation services to shine, rather than take a chance with the error-ridden automatic translations you are likely to get with an online tool like Google Translate. You might also want to maintain the formatting and layout of your original website, and an automatic translation offers no guarantee that this will be preserved.
The article also covers the possibility of restricting the translate tag from certain types of information, such as product names as in this example, or contact information might be another type of information you might want to keep in the source language. I can just imagine if customers starting showing up to your ‘translated’ street address, only to find a police station instead of a shoe store!
To help your customers find their way, you can prevent Google Translate from translating certain keywords or search terms by putting an extra space with a plus (+) sign in front of the words you want to keep in the source language.
And that’s today’s tech byte from a non-techie translator!
