Translation Flags or Not Translation Flags

Although I live in Tucson, Arizona, and most people here expect that if you’re bilingual, you speak English and Spanish, the luck of my particular circumstances has enabled me to develop web sites for several individuals and groups who speak various Eastern European languages. Add on top of that a niche web site for a product with a potential world market, and I started taking a serious look at automatic web translators, and linking to them from flag icons on my web sites.

Before you roll your eyes in your head because the reputations of robot translations is so bad, you might consider that the industry is continuously advancing, well parts of it are anyway, and the ones making the most progress can indeed give the reader a sense of what is being said. If you’re not bilingual yourself, the best way to test a translation is to translate it back again, and see if you can read the double-translation. You can even test it in several languages, to convince yourself for or against putting translation flags on your site. So far, my own tests have led me to use Google’s translators, as far and away the ones most likely to help me communicate with people around the world.  Yes, Google offers a gadget:

But personally, I prefer the friendly look of linked translation flags reaching out to a worldwide audience. Either way, looking at my web sites in various alphabets of the world is very cool 🙂