14 DAY TRIAL // Google Translate is one of Google's hidden gems, a tool that is always getting better and more powerful. Google is making use of that tool in more ways than it would seem at first glance. One way it’s leveraging its translation prowess is via the Website Translator plugin, which enables websites to offer translated versions to visitors easily and for free.
Now, Google is improving the tool by making it possible for website owners to provide their own improved or corrected translations as well as making it possible for users to offer their own takes on the translation.
"We’re launching a new experimental feature (in beta) that lets you customize and improve the way the Website Translator translates your site," Google's Jeff Chin, a product manager at Google Translate, wrote.
"Once you add the customization meta tag to a webpage, visitors will see your customized translations whenever they translate the page, even when they use the translation feature in Chrome and Google Toolbar," he added.
"They’ll also now be able to 'suggest a better translation' when they notice a translation that’s not quite right, and later you can accept and use that suggestion on your site," he said.
The new feature is easy to use since it's just an improvement of the old Website Translator plugin. If you want to use it for your site, just embed it and chose one of the languages translations are available in.
You'll get a preview of the translated site and be able to edit the parts that don't quite seem right. You'll be able to choose from alternative translations or provide your own. Once you're done, that's the translation that visitors will get for your site, no matter how they use Google's Translation tools.
The nice part is that visitors will also be able to suggest better translations, which will wait for your approval. If you believe the new version is better, you can use it on your site as the default.