WordPress Plugin - Robs Translator - English to 10 languages!
March 20th, 2007 by Rob Scott Posted in WordPress PluginsI’ve created my first WordPress plugin!
The Robs Translator plug-in allows your blog viewers to translate your blog from English to one of 10 languages! Languages currently supported are:
- German
- French
- Italian
- Spanish
- Korean
- Chinese (Traditional)
- Chinese (Simplified)
- Potugese
- Japanese
- Russian
This plugin has been modified from the wp-translate plugin, created by Scott Trough, which can be found here.
The reasons for modification? I can not use the Altavista Babelfish translator with this site - it simply does not work, the Babelfish cannot get past my headers (and it was easier to re-create the plugin than the site)! Instead, I altered the translate php to use Google translations, removed the languages which Google does not support, and added the ones it does!
I could not find a free plug-in which uses the Google translations, so I made my own!
23 Responses to “WordPress Plugin - Robs Translator - English to 10 languages!”
By John Pozadzides on Mar 22, 2007
ilfilosofo.comRob,
4 things:
1.) You appear to have a SERIOUS security issue with your Wordpress. When I created a login to post a comment it appears that your default setting has made me more than a subscriber. On the back end I can see your Google Analytics configuration, and I appear to have the ability to write a post.
Now, it may just be that I’m not used to WP 2.1, but please look into this for your own safety.
2.) Rather than requiring users to register to post comments can I suggest that you install a capcha and allow non-registered users to comment? I did this on my blog months ago and I haven’t had any more problem with spammers than I had previously anyway. I recommend Filosofo Comments Preview (http://www.ilfilosofo.com/blog/comments-preview/) which will allow you to give visitors the ability to preview comments as well as protect with capcha.
3.) With regards to the Translator plugin, might I suggest that you change the Alt text to read “Translate to [Language]” as opposed to “[Language] flag”? It makes much more sense for people without images turned on, or who are visually impaired - plus it pops up with the text when hovering over it in a Web browser with the mouse.
4) Finally, I installed the plugin on a new blog I’m prepping at http://blog.htmlhelp.com but it’s not working properly. It seems to only be passing partial URLs when you click on an icon. Do you have any idea how to fix this?
Take care,
John
By Rob Scott on Mar 22, 2007
Thanks for that, John, I’ve sent you an email!
I’ll look into the latter point ASAP.
Rob
By botb on Mar 25, 2007
Awesome modification, the other tranlator would not work with my theme and this one works great.
By UKStevieB on Apr 1, 2007
Thanks for this plugin, I have tried it out on my Sandbox site and have now moved it to my main blog, a really useful addition to my site, cheers!
By Lee on Apr 17, 2007
would have been great to see it working on this site, dont you think?
By Rob Scott on Apr 17, 2007
Lee - can you read? It works with Firefox…
I think that is mentioned about 6 times site-wide. Including, RIGHT UNDER THE TRANSLATION PICTURES.
It does work. But not with IE, which doesn’t appreciate valid code for some reason.
Thanks for the comment.
By erik on May 1, 2007
site.comIt’s not that IE doesn’t appreciate valid code. IE doesn’t pass the HTTP_REFERER in the same way as Firefox, which is what causes the error.
With more people moving to Vista and IE7, this makes for an issue with the plugin becoming obsolete. I am moving to another plugin by Angsuman which hard-translates the data and includes it on your website’s end (i.e. www.site.com/pt/ would be the portuguese translation)
Thanks for your easy to use plugin though, I have made use of it until now.
Cheers
By Rob Scott on May 1, 2007
I appreciate this, however, IE does not pass the HTTP_REFFERER at all in the manner it needs to. I don’t use IE, nor do most of the people who use this site (I have the statistics to prove it), so I haven’t accommodated IE (yet).
Furthermore, the reason I created the translator plugin using google was precisely because i did not want to increase server load and the amount of physical space taken up by the blog. If you have room and bandwidth to support 10+ translated replicas of the same information on your server, that is fine, however, I felt that this offered a good in between option.
No need to plug the NOT FREE translation plugin. In actual fact, if you want a good one that places it in your own site, you can get them for free. But I guess you wouldn’t know that.
As for FF becoming obsolete - I seriously doubt that Windows Vista is going to make any difference to the numbers of people migrating to FF. With the full support of Google, do you really anticipate that Firefox browsers will become obsolete? Considering it is the browser of choice for many internet professionals, I would seriously doubt this.
By firma rehberi on May 20, 2007
Thanks
By manekineko on May 28, 2007
Is there a working example somewhere you could point to?
I’m using Firefox and don’t see any translation pictures, I read your (rude) reply to the other guy asking about it but couldn’t find them
thanks
By Rob Scott on May 29, 2007
The translation pictures should appear st the top of the sidebar in this blog. However, due to your screen resolution, the sidebar sometimes appears at the bottom of the page - this occurs only on your browser. There are several other sites which use this plugin too, I’ll have a look for them in the next week or so.
Apologies if you thought my previous response was rude, however, when you read the comment again, perhaps you will appreciate how flippant, and, in the context of my having developed and provided a working, though admittedly limited, free translation plugin, entirely unneccessary. If I was rude in that instance, it is due to those reasons.
Your question is perfectly reasonable, the one above was simply a dig at me.
If you cannot find a working version on this site, then perhaps there is another issue which I had not considered.
In the wake of a huge barrage of requests for my time, including those coming from people who have admitted they are trying to get this plugin to work for their own paying clients, I have decided to keep development of this on the absolute back-burner. Quite simply, it is not worth devoting any more of my time and effort to this thankless task when there are better things I can be doing.
Sorry if I seem terse, but I have lost all patience with the people who constantly contact me expecting something for nothing, or who complain that it does not work before taking the time to test it out, or read the known faults I had listed.
Fairly soon, I’ll remove the plugin download, and just use it myself - life is too short to deal with this type of stuff.
By Rob Scott on May 29, 2007
Incidentally, the translation pictures only appear on the homepage of this blog - how would someone who cannot read English get any deeper into the site?
By Vinod on May 31, 2007
The WP 2.2 translate() call breaks the plugin. But editing it to translaterobs() or something like that works perfectly!
You can see it at the footer of my blog.
Thanks Rob!