Add Language Translation Flags to your web site

What's you first reaction when you land on a website that's written in Russian, Chinese or Japanese ? Most of us would hunt for that English language translation flag and if that's missing, we will copy-paste the site address in Google Translate website to convert the site content to English.

Way too much effort. Now let's reverse the roles and say somebody from China or Japan visits your blog (written in English). The foreign visitor will have exactly the same problems that you faced when you were visiting that non-English website above.

Since more than 65% of web users speak a language other than English, it is essential that you provide language translation features in your blog so that you don't miss the non-English speaking traffic.

So when an Arabic visitor passes your English blog, he or she can just click the Arab flag to translate the website into his native language - That way you don't loose a visitor plus he could even subscribe if the content is good even if written in another language.

Here's a quick tutorial to add language translation to your blog. You can be any blogging platform including Blogger, Typepad, Wordpress that provides access to templates. The visitor will see nine country flags corresponding to German, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Arabic, French, Portuguese, Spanish and Italian languages.

All you have to do is copy-paste the following lines of Javascript code anywhere in your blog template.

<form action="http://www.google.com/translate" >

<script language="JavaScript">
<!--
document.write ("<input name=u value="+location.href+" type=hidden>")
// -->
</script>

<input name="hl" value="en" type="hidden">

<input name="ie" value="UTF8" type="hidden">

<input name="langpair" value="" type="hidden">

<input name="langpair" value="en|fr" title="French" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539949_e76af75976.jpg" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30">

<input name="langpair" value="en|de" title="German" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539933_041ca1eda2.jpg" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30">

<input name="langpair" value="en|it" title="Italian" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539953_0384ccecf9.jpg" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30">

<input name="langpair" value="en|pt" title="Portuguese" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539966_0d09b410b5.jpg" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30">

<input name="langpair" value="en|es" title="Spanish" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539946_2fabed0dbf.jpg" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30">

<input name="langpair" value="en|ja" title="Japanese" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539955_925e6683c8.jpg" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30">

<input name="langpair" value="en|ko" title="Korean" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/13539958_3c3b482c95.jpg" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30">

<input name="langpair" value="en|zh-CN" title="Chinese Simplified" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/img/43/1633/320/14324441_5ca5ce3423.jpg" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30">

<input name="langpair2" value="en|ar" title="Arabic" src= "http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/3709/485/1600/arabic-flag.gif" onclick="this.form.langpair.value=this.value" height="20" type="image" width="30" />
</form>

Actually the above tutorial is an enhanced version of our previous Language Translation Tutorial.

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