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Add Multiple Language Translation To Your Website For Free!
This article will discuss my personal experience in setting up the Translingo script. A step-by-step guide with assistance for getting it to work the way that your want. As Translingo is Freeware, it is free for both private and commercial use however, some of the third party translation engines may have conditional terms but you are free to choose which engines you offer.
Half of the world either can't speak English or they prefer to search the web in their own language. If your website is not multilingual these people are never going to find you.
Translingo provides dynamic translation ( real time, on the fly translation, without additional page or storage requirements ) of your website to and from over 30 languages.
You need to have CGI support and at least version 5 of the Perl interpreter on your system, which can be hosted on either a Windows or Unix (all flavours) server.
Download and unzip the Translingo distribution file. Copy the Translingo folder to your public web space, usually /public_html or /www, in ASCII mode except for the .jpg image, which should be uploaded in Binary mode. Open the translingo.pl script from the cgi-bin where you extracted it and modify ( if necessary ) the path to Perl. Modify the 3 variables according to the information within the script.
Upload the translingo.pl script (in ASCII mode ) to your cgi-bin or where you can execute CGI scripts. Use chmod or your FTP client to set the script to executable. Point your browse to http://www.yourserver.com/cgi-bin/translingo.pl and run the code wizard to automatically create the html code for your page. If you are using the same format on each page then you simply use the same Translingo code on each page. You could use an shtml include statement to automatically add the code to all of your page footers. When new engines are added you just have to update the one footer text file.
In my case, I wanted to be able to translate pages in a sub domain regardless of how it was accessed. You may have a sub domain working as http://subdomain.domain.com , which could also be accessed as http://domain.com/subdomain/ . This is easy to accomplish as your main chi-bin will handle the conventional calls to domain/subdirectory and if you add another copy of Translingo to your subdirectory cgi-bin, it will handle calls to subdirectory.domain.com. An added bonus is that once a user translates one of your pages, any links they click within your website will automatically be translated in the selected language. You can see a working site by clicking the link in the resource box below.
About the Author:
Kerry McNally has 30+ years of Marketing and Management experience combined with ongoing, online research. Kerry is a member of the Australian Marketing Institute and he is an accomplished PC ( DOS, Linux, Windows & Web ) programmer.
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