(22/4/2008)

WordPress Without Borders (WWB) is a plugin that allows readers of your blog to automatically translate content on the fly. It is based on Google’s new AJAX language translation API, and intelligently provides translation capabilities to your blog based on each particular readers’ browser settings.

How Does It Work?

Most browsers allow the user to set the desired language he or she wishes to read websites in. When that browser requests a page from a web-server, it provides a list of acceptable languages and the particular order it wishes to receive them in. WordPress Without Borders uses this information to determine whether or not a page requires translation, offering the user the ability to translate the content on the fly should the source language of the blog not match any of the languages in the user’s list.

Is The Translation Any Good?

Translation has always been a chicken and egg type of problem — because the computer translations haven’t been very accurate, not many services have implemented translation, which has resulted in little to no motivation for companies to improve the algorithms. With WordPress Without Borders we hope to increase the readability of current WordPress websites, while providing a large, useful data set for Google to improve their algorithms.

Features

Here’s a list of some of the current features of the plugin:

• A menu bar will magically appear at the top of the browser when translation is required for either the content or comments of a particular entry
• If there is no direct conversion available between two languages (for example, chinese to french), english is used as a proxy language to assist with the translation
• All translation menus are presented in the requested language automatically

What Languages Are Supported?

WordPress Without Borders supports whatever languages the Google AJAX API supports. At this time of this entry, those languages are:

• Arabic
• Chinese (Simplified and Traditional)
• Dutch
• English
• French
• German
• Greek
• Italian
• Japanese
• Korean
• Portuguese
• Russian
• Spanish

Since the Google language API does not natively support translation between every language in the above list, Wordpress Without Borders will sometimes use an intermediate language (such as English) to assist in the translation.

Installation

To install WordPress Without Borders, uncompress the download into your plugins directory and activate the plugin via the WordPress dashboard. By default, WWB will only translate tags and categories automatically, and will require a few small theme changes to translate other content. The changes required are:

• replace the_content() with bnc_the_content() to allow for translation of the content
• replace the_title() with bnc_the_title() to allow for translation of the titles
• replace comment_text() with bnc_comment_text() to allow for translation of comments
• replace the_excerpt() with bnc_the_excerpt() to allow for translation of excerpts

Usage

After installation, WordPress Without Borders will automatically float a bar at the top of the browser page if translation is required (either content, or comments). The user is then presented with a menu option to translate content.

Examples of use

Here are a few images detailing the usage of WordPress Without Borders.

An Example Wordpress Blog Written In Japanese

Comments That Were Automatically Translated From Other Languages

Revision History

1.1 - Changed branding