5 replies to this topic

[tommr]

I get quite a bit of traffic to my butterfly wind chime page from a page that is hosted in France.
I thought I should offer a French version.
It would be simple to just do the page over in French and offer a links that would read "cliquez pour la version française" but I wondered if there is a better way.

I wonder if this is duplicate content.
Then again maybe I should post a link to a Google translation.
It might be mean to translate one page and then leave the rest in English.

[iamlost]

I wonder if this is duplicate content.

No.
It is not duplicate content when it is in a different language.

Then again maybe I should post a link to a Google translation.

No.
Google does poor to adequate translation but nothing near good enough if you are serious about providing a good visitor experience. Especially if you are only translating one or a few pages do it right.

It might be mean to translate one page and then leave the rest in English.

Why?
If you have a good response from the translated page see which other pages visitors from Francophone countries (or Quebec) visit in numbers and translate as seems practical - as in does the page conversion value cover the cost of translation...

Off Topic

Some of us blocked (Yahoo) babelfish and then (Google) translate, and lately (Google) Wireless Transcoder, because scrapers do use them to copy sites into other languages... Perhaps half my DCMAs have been to SEs to clear out auto-scraped auto-translated content... started a half dozen years or so ago but with the block has become negligible...
Note: Whether, which, or how you block depends on your business model and visitor demographic/geographic breakouts.
Note: Also why some of us do not allow SE public caching of our sites.

[JVRudnick]

just a short reminder...that an Eng to Fr translation runs about 15% "longer" ie more text we've found....so if you've a "concrete" layout, you may need to think on that, eh!

:-)

Jim

PS dup? nope, I think that G et al find the Eng/Fr translation button and then ignore same...ie any thought that this could be a duplicate page....

[tommr]

I found that it would probably cost about $50.00 more or less to translate a page.

I also found there are subtle differences between french in France and french in Quebec.

After a talk with my well traveled sister I was informed of the fact that many french can read English.

So maybe some info on international shipping would be in order.

So in the mean time I am sticking a translate button on the page in question.

[cre8pc]

So maybe some info on international shipping would be in order.

This gets my vote

[jocelyn]

Yeah, a lot of french people read English, and I guess this is why you got a link from France. There are some differences between Quebec and France french, but when you write, you always use the french from France. It's more the expressions where some words we and they use are different, but I doubt you'd use that type of expressions in your writing.

Translation tools are really bad... and using one will make you sound like a brain dead cheap dude. If you wanna put a french page, pay the 50$, cause as soon as we get a tool translated page, we're gone, cause it makes no sense. It's better to leave it English only if you ain't gonna pay a french guy to do the translation properly.