One of the great features of an interactive website is its availability in various languages. Adding a language translation to website and blogs is a great way to make your foreign visitors like your website. Commonly, a .po file (then converted to .mo) is needed in embedding languages to a website. Another option is integrating web services that will automatically translate your website with a single click – Google translate and Babelfish. Here are two ways to embed language translation to your website or blogs:

1. Convert .po to .mo file for Language Translation

What is .po file? A PO file is made up of many entries, each entry holding the relation between an original untranslated string and its corresponding translation. All entries in a given PO file usually pertain to a single project, and all translations are expressed in a single target language. GNU

I found these great tools to start and customize your website translations:

a. Poedit

Poedit is cross-platform gettext catalogs (.po files) editor. It is built with wxWidgets toolkit and can run on any platform supported by it (although it was only tested on Unix with GTK+ and Windows). It aims to provide more convenient approach to editing catalogs than launching vi and editing the file by hand.
Visit the site

b. KBabel

Another open source PO editing program for the KDE window manager on Linux.
KBabel is a set of tools for editing and managing gettext PO files. Main part is a powerful and comfortable PO file editor which features full navigation capabilities, full editing functionality, possibility to search for translations in different dictionaries, spell and syntax checking, showing diffs and many more. Visit the site

2. Single Click Website Translation

The most popular free Web-based language translation tools are offered by Google and AltaVista Babelfish.

a. Alta Vista Babel Fish:

Adding Babel Fish Translation to your site is free and easy. Babel Fish Translate is available in English, German, Spanish, French, Italian and Portuguese. Just add the following line of JavaScript code to your website.

<script type="text/javascript" charset="UTF-8" language="JavaScript1.2" src="http://uk.babelfish.yahoo.com/free_trans_service/babelfish2.js?from_lang=en&region=us"></script> 

b. Google Translate:

Add Google’s website translator to your webpages, and offer instant access to automatic translation of the pages. Adding the website translator is quick and easy. Available in Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Welsh and Yiddish. Just copy the code below and add it to your website.

<div id="google_translate_element"></div><script>
function googleTranslateElementInit() {
  new google.translate.TranslateElement({
    pageLanguage: 'en'
  }, 'google_translate_element');
}
</script><script src="http://translate.google.com/translate_a/element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit"></script>

If you like this post/tutorial...

You can buy me a coffee and help maintain N-Designs. This entry was posted on Sunday, December 13th, 2009 and is filed under Site Updates by Nazcar Pine.
Tags: .po to .mo, altavista, babelfish, Google translate, language translation