Ask HN: Are there cheap ways to make websites multi-lingual? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are there cheap ways to make websites multi-lingual?

I run a informational website as a hobby to try and help people.

The site has a large number of US visitors. I know the content is relevant to a number of other countries/foreign language speakers.

I realize these users can use google translate, but that doesn't seem to address the fact that my site won't rank highly for searches in other languages, like it does for english searches.

I've had a number of volunteers offer to translate the site, however the issue with that is that when I update the content, the translation would need to be re-done.

Are there any good ways to make my site available that don't require large amounts of $ or time? (and therefore able to rank on foreign language google searches)

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The ideal solution is perhaps:

- uses google powered machine translation

- automatically copies the site and sets up subdomains or interfaces with my static site generator

- updates when my English site updates

- updates when the machine translations get better

- has the option to pay a fee to have humans go and improve the machine translation for my most popular languages

- maybe has some easy interface that makes it possible for volunteers to improve the machine translation, showing them the English and translation side by side or something

- charges either no fee or a fee based on number of visits to my site to price discriminate, and optional extra for human improvement

It seems like if all sites had something like this it could help make the internet equally content rich for foreign language speakers, too.

Does this exist?

Ah, you've just run into the whole i18n thing. It's a pain.

You say "cheap" - depends what you mean - if you mean "free" then I think you'll have to rely on volunteers.

As you highlighted there are actually two issues here: 1) Getting the pages translated 2) Translating updates to pages and new content.

Managing the translated content so that you don't need to re-translate things that have already been translated is quite tricky. There are tools out there that are basically a database of translated strings, so that if any strings change you only need to translate new strings.

One possible route is to take a look at UpWork. If you combine cheap labour that can be found there, plus volunteers, with some kind of open source i18n management database (for managing translated strings) I think that's possibly as cheap as things will get.

Whether it will be worth the hassle or not is another thing...

In the past I've used the Google page translation code: https://translate.google.com/manager/website/?hl=yi

It works pretty good. There's no way to tell if it's 100% accurate, but its nice to offer the feature to your visitors. However, I ended up removing it because I just didn't have any room for it anywhere on the website anymore, as it is pretty much on a page-by-page basis, and the majority of my visitors are English-speaking anyway.

Cheeky but my girlfriend runs a website translation service. She normally focuses on AirBnB listings but handles many other kinds (English/French/Spanish)

https://airbnbtranslation.com/

Check out Mozilla's pontoon

Check out wovn.io

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