Question about Google Translator with flags for BC website

[Guest]

Hello

I am looking for a solution for my website , I am using Business Catalyst as platform to create the website.  I am looking for simple one code/plugin/HTML solution which I can copy paste in the website for the translation. I want to put google translator with flags on my website in the top right hand side. I want to translate my website in 9 languages and want to put 9 country flags on the top right hand side,  which translate languages on click event on "same page" , I want the translation must take place at the same page after clicking on the flag. How-ever I successfully integrated google translate with dropdown option but want to integrate google flag translations on my website.

Please let me know what can be done here.

Regards'

[TheBCMan]

Don't use google translate, it's the worst user experience you can ever give a user and makes the site look like it was designed by a 12 year old with a grammer problem. Machine translation is no were near anything good for a production website currently and even more so for non latin languages like Japanese, Chinese, Korean etc.

Case and point, throw a few lines of text into google translate, then reverse the translation back to english, you'll see my point.

[_JaniceC]

First of all, please avoid using FLAGS to denote languages. Flags represent political entities and languages cross country boundaries. I know it looks cute and colorful, but it's just wrong. Yes, I have caught my own company doing it. I  not against using machine translation, as long as you and your customers know what they are getting into. If you put some kind of button or widget on a page, with a menu of available languages, and you add a disclaimer (something about the translation being done by a machine, and the quality is not human-like, and use at your own risk), then better. Also, I think for sales and marketing content, or any content that should be of the highest professional, publication quality, you should not. That said, we have experimented with it on marketing content at Adobe, but in controlled use cases. I am in big favor of using it for help and support content and many technical companies do that, such as Cisco, Intel, Microsoft and more. In the absence of translations, is a raw machine-generated translation better than English for your customers, users and community? That is the question you must consider. We at Adobe prefer to make it optional. The website visitor must initiate the click on a translation button. We give the option to return easily to the source English.

[TheBCMan]

Echoing my 2 year old reply, with my 2 cents.... don't use machine translation, it looks lazy and that you don't care enough about the user of that language to spend the 50 - 100 dollars it would take on upwork.com to get your site correctly translated.

Have you ever giggled at an engrish sign you've seen on the internet? That is what users of other languages are doing when they see your website... if you want your website to read like this:

Go for machine translation.... If you want to see more do a google image search for "machine translation fail"

Basically if a user wants to see there website in another language they can use machine translation by themselves and understand this is not an official method, otherwise it's useless, it's about 50 - 60% accurate (but getting better) and offering it (even with a warning) make you look like you don't care. It's better IMO to not offer it then offer a broken experience.

/2cents