With great fanfare, Google announced on September 30, 2009 that “Today, we’re happy to announce a new website translator gadget powered by Google Translate that enables you to make your site’s content available in 51 languages. Now, when people visit your page, if their language (as determined by their browser settings) is different than the language of your page, they’ll be prompted to automatically translate the page into their own language. If the visitor’s language is the same as the language of your page, no translation banner will appear.” See the original announcement in Google’s own blog.
Did you click the link? Now look closely at the Official Google Blog again. Did you notice anything strange? Where is that fantastic translation gadget? If the widget is so great, why doesn’t Google use it on their own blog? If it’s good for me, shouldn’t it be good for them too?
Now go through all of Google’s blogs which you can access from Google’s blog directory. Guess how many have the translation gadget. I’ll give you a hint: it’s a round number (zero). And there are several regional blogs written in non-English languages. Why not serve these blogs in English via the Google translation gadget when an English speaker reads them?
If this is an oversight on the part of Google, then we should expect to see the translation gadget soon on all of Google’s blogs. But if the translation gadgets are not ready for prime time, maybe other bloggers and website publishers should take note of this.
