Going Global – Translation is A Big Deal – Global Translator Plugin for WordPress

Posted by John Saddington on Jan 23, 2009

Something that has been itching my brain is how little the modern day evangelical church does in terms of localization. Especially in the online space.

Apparently, our content does get out there into the other non-english speaking countries. And if that’s true, then why don’t we have a little money in the budget for translation of our content? Or why is it something that isn’t really thought about?

I had the pleasure of leading the design, development, and launch of DriveInternational.org a few days ago and it was simply amazing to see 54 different countries all watching a live broadcast and chatting away in 11 different chat rooms.

Just take a look at the real-time map!

But when I surveyed our moderators for the conversations, only 1 person had the proficiency of speaking another language… we apparently missed 52 of the rest.

And that wasn’t necessarily our fault, and this particular situation was different. But for our static content, we should be translating that stuff. People want to read it and we should give it to them.

Perhaps one of the biggest reasons that organizations don’t do it is because of time and budget. It can be costly and it certainly can take a lot of time. But believe you me, technology is catching up fast and translation time (and cost) is going down just as fast.

For example, if you run a WordPress blog, you can install this free Global Translator Plugin which will translate your content, on the fly with SEO-enabled and ready cached links, with just the click of a button.

34 languages:

Italian, Korean, Chinese (Simplified & Traditional), Portuguese, English, German, French, Spanish, Japanese, Arabic, Russian, Greek, Dutch, Bulgarian, Czech, Croatian, Danish, Finnish, Hindi, Polish, Romanian, Swedish, Norwegian, Catalan, Filipino, Hebrew, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese.

Wow. That’s awesome.

Is your church considering localization? Is your web-content translated and ready for consumption in the different parts of the world? Is that even a priority for you?

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About the Author

John Saddington

John is the Chief Editor @ The 8BIT Network and Senior Blog Junkie here at ChurchCrunch.He enjoys Triple-Tall Americanos, developing Wordpress Themes, and a few other Random Things.

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10 Responses to “Going Global – Translation is A Big Deal – Global Translator Plugin for WordPress”

Mike Unwalla
Friday, January 23, 2009 at 10:13 am
"you can install this free Global Translator Plugin which will translate your content, on the fly with SEO-enabled and ready cached links, with just the click of a button."
Frequently, machine translation gives incorrect translations, or nonsense translations. If you want to use machine translation, optimise the text for machine translation. You can get more information from http://www.international-english.co.uk.
Reply
- human3rror
  Friday, January 23, 2009 at 1:17 pm
  that's true. but they are getting better. read some more about it at the plugin page.
  the plugin isn't the point here either, the focus really is about localization strategies as a whole.
  thanks!
  Reply
Daniel_Berman
Friday, January 23, 2009 at 3:33 pm
Gospel Translations (http://gospeltranslations.org)is currently working toward translating numerous church resources into other languages. They are visionaries for beginning this work, but you are right there is much work that needs to be done.
My dream is that resources from the Catholic church, Orthodox Christian church, and the Protestant church could be found in one central online location in all major languages. Perhaps Gospel Translations is the one to accomplish this. Keep praying.
Reply
- human3rror
  Friday, January 23, 2009 at 3:42 pm
  sweet. thx for sharing the resource daniel! definitely one to be praying about.
  Reply
Jason
Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 3:23 am
Hello. I would love to trade links with you. My website is http://econochristian.com.
Let me know if you want to trade links. I will promote your site if you do mine.
Jason
Reply
- human3rror
  Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 11:44 am
  eh, nah.
  why don't you hang around instead, have a conversation, and try to make some relationships here instead of asking for free linkage?
  Reply
- human3rror
  Wednesday, April 15, 2009 at 11:44 am
  eh, nah.
  why don't you hang around instead, have a conversation, and try to make some relationships here instead of asking for free linkage?
  Reply
Jason
Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 1:04 am
Nothing is for free, sir. I was making a mutual exchange.
Reply
human3rror
Thursday, April 16, 2009 at 1:07 am
Jason,
All good. No thanks!
John
Reply