Right, we have all seen examples of using simple javascript snippets to enable google’s translation service to users for a given MODx site, as well as dealing with individual translation tables requiring lots of work to integrate and deploy properly.
However, what about translating site content using google translation service on the fly, by plugging the translation service to MODx backend?
Interesting article i came across in my old haunt, seems like they have done something along these lines for their forums:
http://psx-scene.com/forums/f6/psx-scene-goes-multi-language-71583/
The big advantage of doing things this way is that you potentialy increase your content 20-30 times as your server now has 20-30 versions of the same page, translated in different languages, ready to target various countries’ internationalised google searches (I presume?). Googlebot comes along and indexes all these pages and bingo - your translated page is appearing in google.it/es/fr/hr/etc searches (theory).
This potentially brings tremendous SEO benefit without really needing a lot of work to get the project off the ground (after looking at some posts on how internationalisation is handled within MODx)
My question follows - what do you think of the concept above, how much SEO benefit do you thing it brings, and how easy do you think something like this could be integrated into MODx?
Requirements:
Have subdomains or domain prefixes (or subfolders) showing content in internationalised versions (as per other guides & posts in forums)
Content could be translated on the fly and then piped back to user, or translated and cached ready for rendering by MODx
A plugin developed for this purpose in MODx
No need to go into translating specific menu items, headers etc, you pipe the whole page through after MODx has finished putting all the pieces together, and hope for the best!
Here’s a class dealing with such a thing in PHP, im guessing this could be adopted?
http://www.codediesel.com/php/google-translation-php-wrapper/
Something like this would be perfect for my modx site, which has lots of user generated content, sitting in a separate database.
