automatic translation script - anyone want to convert this one for MODx?

I need to integrate automatic translations on some sites. With Google Translate or Yahoo Babelfish, it is possible to add a little widget to any page and get a translation, but this brings no SEO benefit to the site, as the translated pages are not on the site’s domain.

An SEO called Will Spencer created a script to get around this issue, by calling on one or both of these translation engines, and caching a copy on your domain, allowing you to effectively create a multilingual site and (theoretically) benefit from additional non-English search engine traffic and the use of local language anchor text for internal site links:

http://www.free-internet-media.com/translation-script

Being a newbie to php, I’ll start playing around with this script *as is* and try to integrate it on a site of mine for testing.

But, I also wanted to throw the idea out there in case someone with enough skill saw this as a worthy project for MODx snippet or plugin - it would be nice to administer such capabilities from within MODx - I looked and I did not find any auto translation scripts in the MODx repository.

After a quick look, I don’t think it would be a trivial job to integrate this into MODx. It has its own index.php file and its own .htaccess file. They go in a subdirectory but since all MODx pages are accessed through the MODx index.php at the site root, the translation index.php would never execute. It’s possible that the stuff in their index.php could be combined with translation.php and $modx->sendRedirect() but it’s definitely not as simple as just putting the code in a snippet.

OTOH, it’s definitely doable.

It raises some philosophical questions, though. It puts a lot of extra pressure on your web hosting service (and possibly the people who share it) to do something that can be already be done quite easily without *any* demands on your host. The user’s experience is possibly faster once you cache the pages, but slower when they hit a page that isn’t cached -- so probably a wash. It does take some pressure off of Google and Yahoo, but is it like taking a whole lot of free samples from some other business and handing them out to your customers?

Thanks for the response. I see the problems you have pointed out with the implementation; perhaps someone will come up with a port of this or on of the wordpress plugins for this functionality eventually - maybe me if i get the skills. Anyway...

Quote from: BobRay at Aug 27, 2008, 12:28 PM

It raises some philosophical questions, though. It puts a lot of extra pressure on your web hosting service (and possibly the people who share it) to do something that can be already be done quite easily without *any* demands on your host. The user’s experience is possibly faster once you cache the pages, but slower when they hit a page that isn’t cached -- so probably a wash. It does take some pressure off of Google and Yahoo, but is it like taking a whole lot of free samples from some other business and handing them out to your customers?

It is interesting, but the potential "philosophical questions" for me are quite different, and have to do with the unintelligibility of auto translation and how it could basically be considered spam, when used in this way. I don’t like spam.

But, to address your points - pressure on hosting and people sharing my IP, I can’t consider it. That’s like saying, I have no right to host mp3 or image files on my shared web hosting service, when Google Sites, box.net and a multitude of other free services will host my stuff free of charge - I mean, maybe the whole web should be subdomains of blogger.com? All hosting and bandwidth issues can easily be taking care of in my Google account alone, so with this argument, I have no right to hosting anything on my shared web host.

As for free samples: It is not against google’s policy to translate texts and then use the translated version - that is why they provide a variety of tools for it (the auto translator that this script is based on, a free text area to translate from any language to any other, and an area to enter *any* URL and they will translate the whole text of that URL), so I do not think that the free samples argument is valid.