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Google Translate WordPress Plugin

John P.

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Google Translate Vertical
The Google Translator plugin allows WordPress to add a number of alternate languages to your blog.

This plugin is derived from Scott Hough’s WP Translate, but makes a number of changes:

  • The Google Translate service is used, which does a much better job of maintaining page layout then Babelfish.
  • Height and width attributes are included for all images.
  • ‘rel=nofollow’ has been added to all links to prevent search engines from following them.
  • Alternate text for all images have been improved.
  • The plugin fully validates under XHTML.

Download

Download Google Translate v.3.24.07

Installation

Google Translate should work in all versions of WordPress 1.5 and newer.

  • To install the plugin simply unzip then upload the entire google-translate directory to your plugins folder (/wp-content/plugins/)
  • Activate the plugin within the WordPress Administration Plugins area.

Usage

To add Google Translate to your web page you will need to edit your templates to include the function.

Google Translate

For a horizontal layout add the following:

<?php if(function_exists(‘google_translate’)) google_translate(2); ?>

For a vertical layout add the following:

<?php if(function_exists(‘google_translate’)) google_translate(1); ?>

Use As a Sidebar Widget

If you would rather include the translation in a Widget sidebar you will first need to add a plugin which allows you to execute PHP within the sidebar. I recommend the ExecPHP plugin.

After installation and activation of ExecPHP you can include the Google Translate function within the sidebar Widget area.

License / Warranty

This plugin is distributed freely, just like the original. Feel free to use it, change it to meet your needs, etc. If however you re-distribute it you must include links and reference to Scott Hough and John Pozadzides.

If you find this little widget helps you out and you’d like to return the favor, please provide a link back to One Man’s Blog. Or at least drop me a comment below to let me know it helped out.

Enjoy!

About John P.

John P. is a former CEO, former TV Show Host, and the Founder and Wizard behind Texas Metal Works. You can find him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn. Feel free to send shoutouts, insults, and praise. Or Money. Money is good.

Comments

  1. Kundan Raj Bhattarai says

    Thanks for sharing the article. Previously I used to go to Google translate and then translate it. Now we have the option at the blog itself which makes it easier. But I found it, that it translates fantastic for some languages but for some languages it is not accurate. Anyway it is better to have something than nothing.

    Thanks and Regards.

  2. Ogi says

    Hello John,
    Please, tell me how to change the translation to default “Bulgarian” to X language. When I click for example the German flag it translates from English to German. I am sure in England or US the people can’t understand the origin language of my website.
    It will be of great assistance for me. Thank you in advance,

    Ognian

  3. matias says

    I was wondering, what if I wanted to translate from another language that is not english.

    And what could be the reason Im not seeing the flags, but the language names instead

  4. Dorian Jasik says

    It’s in point of fact a great and useful piece of info. I’m happy that you shared this useful information with us. Please stay us up to date like this. Thanks for sharing.

  6. Ismael Lovato says

    Thanks a lot for sharing this with all people you actually understand what you’re talking approximately! Bookmarked. Please additionally talk over with my website =). We can have a hyperlink exchange contract among us!

  7. Peter says

    <img src="/wp-content/plugins/google-translate/images/germany.gif" width="22" height="15"

    Did have to remove the slash in the code ref to the flags of this wp plugin now its works fine

    <img src="wp-content/plugins/google-translate/images/germany.gif" width="22" height="15"

  8. Bode says

    Hello everyone,
    I have a little problem with translator on my blog and have been receiving numerous comment that they want translator which am finding it a bit diffcuit to get that on my blog since am using http://blog.com if it were to be blogger definitely i wouldnt be having this problem but can anyone help me out how to go about this.

    cheers

    • John P. says

      Bode,

      Those are not real comments on your blog. I took a look and they are all automated spam comments. You can’t believe anything they ask, and I doubt you really need a translate plugin at all.

      You need to delete anything that doesn’t look like a real discussion of the topic on which it is posted, especially if it doesn’t have a real user name, etc. Otherwise Google will think you just have a spam link farm on your site and will penalize you.

      Good luck,

      John P.

  9. Nikolova says

    I have installed the aforementioned plug-in, most of the translations seem to be quite decent, but it appears to not be localised well, especially in terms of date format, which is different for different countries and other small details, which require further and manual localisation

  11. Ranjith says

    Hey,

    First up, thanks for bringing this translator thing to my notice.

    But, doesn’t this work any longer?

    I tried it for my site healthburden.com, but my attempts failed. :(

  15. Ivan says

    Hey John! Can you explain to me how to install this on the kubrick theme? I need to add the horizontal layout on the top right side of the theme header. Thanks for your consideration :-)

  16. Dave Metz says

    This is far supierior to Babelfish, although I thought Bebelfish was pretty good at the time of its release.
    A few more language options would be beneficial. I expect these will gradually be added in due course.
    Many thanks for this great tool.

  17. John P. says

    Ken,

    As I said in the post, “you will need to edit your templates to include the function”.

    Unfortunately, every single WordPress theme is different. And people will want this in different places on their site. There is no way in the universe for me to tell you how or where specifically to put the code in your theme.

    I suggest asking whomever you got your theme from where you can use this code as they should be able to tell you very quickly.

    John P.

  18. Ken Stone says

    Don’t you think it may be a good idea to tell us non-coding non-programing types a little more about where to paste your text?

    I note that others have asked this same question, but have failed to see your response.

    Thanks

    Ken

  20. constantine says

    I found your blog on google and read a few of your other posts. I just added you to my Google News Reader. Keep up the good work. Look forward to reading more from you in the future.

  22. juanjo says

    where can i paste this line? in wich archive of my template?
    php if(function_exists(’google_translate’)) google_translate(2);

    thanks

  24. Juan says

    I installed the plugin, and updated the templates to include the code

    but my blog is not rendering the function. It is like it’s not finding the function.

    any ideas?

  28. Eric says

    Thanks for the explanation, but I’m either too new at this or too dumb to understand your simple instructions about editing “the templates” by adding the following code to include the Google Translate function.

    For a horizontal layout add the following:

    For a vertical layout add the following:

    Where is this added to? On what template? I’ve added the code to the bottom of each of the php template files but nothing appears on any of the pages or within any of the posts.

    Appreciate your help. Thanks in advance.

  29. nirz says

    Also, I’m getting this error when I activate the translate plugin:
    Warning: Cannot modify header information - headers already sent by (output started at /home/indrasuc/public_html/familyofentrepreneurs.com/wp-content/themes/indra/functions.php:30) in /home/indrasuc/public_html/familyofentrepreneurs.com/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 391

  30. nirz says

    I installed and activated the ExecPHP plugin, added the in the sidebar widget and in the functions.php, but it still does not work. What am i doing wrong?

    Thanks for your help

  36. Angel says

    Hi and thanks for the great plugin. I was able to install it and it works fine. I just needed to change the source language, as it is only english to *. I have one question for everybody who is familiar with wordpress and google translate. When we install this plugin in our blog, does google index the translated pages?

  37. riger99 says

    Google now offers Hindi translation, it’s not in this plugin yet (as of May 28, 2008), but all you have to do is add the Indian flag image to the images folder and then add this line of code, just underneath the Chinese translation:

    <a title="Hindi" rel="nofollow" href="http://translate.google.com/translate?u=&langpair=en%7Chi&hl=en&ie=UTF8"> Hindi

  39. gelo says

    I pasted here the solution but it seems the code can’t be properly included . You just need to add two angle brackets together (first the ‘less than’, and after the ‘greater than’) without an space between them, after this:
    ['REQUEST_URI']
    in the third line.

  40. Al at 7P says

    I tried this recommendation, but after I tried to save the changes WordPress inactivated the plugin due to errors. JUst wanted to double-check to see if this indeed is correct?

  41. Thai Spy says

    David,

    Find:

    function google_translate($vh) {
    $currenturl = $_SERVER["PHP_SELF"];
    if ( $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'] '') {
    $currenturl .= "?" . $_SERVER['QUERY_STRING'];
    }

    Replace with:

    function google_translate($vh) {
    $currenturl = $_SERVER["SERVER_NAME'"];
    if ( $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'] '') {
    $currenturl .= $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];
    }

    Good luck.

  42. Sky says

    I implemented your plug-in this afternoon and like it a lot. I wanted to have readers go off to Google to read, rather than trying to integrate the translation into my site ’cause I can’t make WP permalinks work at all, which the other translation plug-ins pretty much require. BTW, the Google translations are really pretty bad, but better than nothing.

    Your plug-in does not work with blogs that are installed in subdirectories because you made the assumption that the icons would be in /wp-content/plugins/google-translate/ which is incorrect if a blog (like mine) isn’t located at the DocRoot of the server. This is probably what “David” (above) was running into.

    If you’ll contact me by email (John) I’ll send you the fixed-up file. It basically requires using the function get_bloginfo(‘wpurl’) to pick up the URL for the installation directory and then dropping that into the SRC= in the code where you inserted the flag icons.

  45. David says

    Hi,

    I couldn’t get this working on my blog. I got WP Translate from Scot working though so not sure why it is.

    Tried to use it in a sidebar widget and nothing showed. WP Translate is in an working
    Tried to use it out of the widget area and none of the icons were showing and I found that it had not picked up my full blog URL (it’s in a ‘blog’ subdirectory) but the plugin was looking for all the images in root/wp-content….etc so wonder if that’s why the whole plugin is bust.

    Any advice?

  46. GaLaL MaSTeR says

    Thanks you 4 nice help & nice blog. I have asite under construction on googlepages can i add a hyperlink 4image except 4 html codes because i need add another languages

  47. Hullabaloo says

    I don’t know why it is doing this. It seems a little strange to me.

    It does all you say but when I click on ‘Chinese’ or ‘Russian’ I get a large white box in the left top corner and the page never stops loading. All the other languages work normally so I don’t know what is going on. I only get this white box when using firefox (2.0.0.4). I tested it out with IE and the white box never shows up.

  48. William says

    Hi John,
    it works great, just like the other guys over here I am a happy user of this wordpress plugin.
    But could you add in a future version of this plugin more languages like arabic and some other exotic ones?

  51. John P. says

    Trakin,

    I specifically designed this plugin not to be followed by search engines out of fear of being penalized for having duplicate content. However, it is very easy to change that…

    If you edit the PHP document and delete ALL instance of, rel="nofollow" it will make all the various languages discoverable.

    Have fun! :-)

    John

  52. trakin says

    John….perfect…Works like a charm… Really appreciate all the help you provided….Just wanted to know if you are going to have future versions of this plugin, which will have permalinks…the one that global translator or angshuman’s paid translator plugin has ???
    That would be great….It helps in search Engine traffic. I guess the pages converted via this plugin may not be indexed by google…

  53. John P. says

    Darrin and Trakin,

    I’m sorry you had those problems. It looks like there was a problem with my insert statement. I’m not sure why because I’m certain I’ve tested it properly before and it was working. Furthermore I see nothing wrong with it now…

    Anyway, please use the following to insert the flags into the page, but only after enabling the plugin. For horizontal:
    <?php google_translate(2); ?>

    For vertical:
    <?php google_translate(1); ?>

    Let me know how that turns out for you. In some installations you might need to add some style to your stylesheet and I might need to adjust the plugin a bit for you to get it to look nice. But I’ll wait to hear back before making changes to it.

    John

  54. trakin says

    John…Thanks for your plugin…However, I have the same problem on my blog. Nothing happens…I tried horizontal and vertical layout…did everything that I was supposed to, but nothing seems to be working…not in the sidebar, or header.php or footer. I am not well versed with php…can you help me out here..it must be small tweak that must be needed…Thanks

  56. Darrin says

    Hi John,

    I downloaded your plugin, but no it doesnt work. There’s nothing on display in my sidebar when I added the code in my sidebar.php file.

    Nope, unfortunately I don’t see any flags. :(

    I’m not using widgets, just adding the php code.

  58. Chris Palmer says

    Hey John P.,

    i would like to thank you so much for this free translation tool, I searched so long for that kind of wordpress plugin but only got commerical ones.
    I immediately set it up on my website http://www.picsandclips.de and it works perfect.
    This is by far one of the best wordpress plugin I`ve ever seen.
    Chris Palmer