Google/Microsoft translator says $87 million is still $87 million in Japanese

We just translated the Geekestate Blog into Japanese with the help of Google and Microsoft.

So what does $87 million mean in Japanese ?

Well…$87 million! This amount of capital has no language barriers and everyone around the world can understand that Zillow’s $87 million war chest is no joke. Congratulations Zillow!

So now for the geeky part…

We have been asked many times about making our blog solutions available in different languages. This seemed like a time consuming task but luckily there already exists slick solutions to this problem (and actually this existed since 2005 so this may be old news but for blogs this may be a good new application). For example, Alta Vista’s Babelfish has been around for a long time and I have seen some web pages with the Babelfish widget installed on their sites. With a single click your site can be translated into a number of language pairs – i.e.

English to Spanish, Spanish to English, English to Japanese, Japanese to English,
English to French, German, Portugese, Italian, Arabic and vice versa

Other solutions include Google’s Translator, and more recently Microsoft launched the Microsoft Live Translator.

This is especially useful for real estate blogs because just like the “$87 million”, real estate is a universal language, everyone reads about buying and selling homes. So if you can provide more ways to connect with different readers who may enjoy other languages you may be able to grow a larger readership.

So how can you use this on your site ? I found an article showing you how to embed the translation tools directly on your site. Here are the steps:

1) Google Translator

Copy this code to your site where you want your langauge translation to appear (i.e. your blog sidebar):

<form action=”http://www.google.com/translate” >
<div align=”left”>
<script language=”JavaScript”>
<!–document.write (“<input name=u value=”+location.href+” type=hidden>”)// –></script>
<input name=”hl” value=”en” type=”hidden”>
<input name=”ie” value=”UTF8″ type=”hidden”>
<input name=”langpair” value=”" type=”hidden”>
<input name=”langpair” value=”en|fr” title=”French” src= “http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539949_e76af75976.jpg” onclick=”this.form.langpair.value=this.value” height=”20″ type=”image” width=”30″>
<input name=”langpair” value=”en|de” title=”German” src= “http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539933_041ca1eda2.jpg” onclick=”this.form.langpair.value=this.value” height=”20″ type=”image” width=”30″>
<input name=”langpair” value=”en|it” title=”Italian” src= “http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539953_0384ccecf9.jpg” onclick=”this.form.langpair.value=this.value” height=”20″ type=”image” width=”30″>
<input name=”langpair” value=”en|pt” title=”Portuguese” src= “http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539966_0d09b410b5.jpg” onclick=”this.form.langpair.value=this.value” height=”20″ type=”image” width=”30″>
<input name=”langpair” value=”en|es” title=”Spanish” src= “http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539946_2fabed0dbf.jpg” onclick=”this.form.langpair.value=this.value” height=”20″ type=”image” width=”30″>
</div>
</form>

2) Add more language options by changing

a)value=”" field to the langauges you want to share – i.e. “en|fr” means English to French

b)title=”" field to Language choice -i.e. “French”

c)Source=”" to image file for the country flag (30px wide by 20px high)

3) Or use the Babelfish widget

<script language=”JavaScript1.2″ src=”http://www.altavista.com/static/scripts/translate_engl.js”></script>

Enjoy!