Roland Bouman's blog goes i18n (Powered by Google Translate)

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Now that Pentaho Solutions is in print, and the first few copies are finding its way towards the readers, I felt like doing something completely unrelated. So, I hacked up a little page translation widget, based on the Google Language API. You can see the result in the top of the left sidebar of my blog right now:



Using it is very simple: just pick the language of choice, and the page (text and some attributes like alt and title) will be translated. Pick the first entry in the list to see the original language again.

This all happens inline by dynamic DOM manipulation, without having to reload the page. I tested it on Chrome 2, Firefox 3.5, Opera 10, Safari 4 and Internet Explorer 6 and 8. So far, it seems to work for all these browsers.

Personally, I feel that the user experience you get with this widget is superior to what you would get with the google translation gadget. In addition, it is pretty easy to to configure the Translator class .

The code to add this to your page is in my opinion reasonably simple:

This really is all the code you need - there are no dependencies on external Javascript frameworks. If you don't need or like the gui, you can of course skip the gui placeholder code as well as the second script and interract with the Translator object programmatically.

The minified javascript file is about 7k, which is not too bad in my opinion. I haven't worried too much about optimizations, and I think it should be possible to cut down on codesize.

Another thing I haven't focused on just now is integration with frameworks - on the contrary I made sure you can use it standalone. But in order to do that, I had to write a few methods to facilitate DOM manipulation and JSON parsing, and its almost certain you will find functions like that are already in your framework.

Anyway, readers, I'd like to hear from you...is this auseful feature on this blog? Would you like to use it on your own blog? If there's enough people that want it, I will make it available on google code or something like that.


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