Jquery language translation plugin

Many of us know that Google is providing an online tool to translate from one language to another language. Of course this translation may not be accurate but the percentage of accuracy varies from language to language based on the language structure. Basically it translates word by word. This tool is really helpful to understand statements in different languages.

But if we have a our own website which is completely in English and there are users which don't know English and they want to know about our site then it is a problem. In this case they may not know that there is a tool which translates text in English to their native language or they don't have time to translate each and every page or they may not be interested to translate at all. Then they may simply skip reading and ignore your site.

To avoid these kind of risks Google also provided us translator API which lets us develop our website to translate from one language to another language. To know more about Google translator please go through the link http://code.google.com/apis/language/translate/v1/getting_started.html. It is very easy to integrate with our website by following this link.

But the major problem with the Google translate API is its limitation with the length of the text we pass to translator. It does not translate if we pass text with more than 5000 characters. It is only helpful where we need to translate a portion of our web page and that too with less than 5000 characters. If we have to translate the complete web page then we need to write complex logic to split the html code into 5000 character sets and translate thru API and then merge the results. This is really paining.

To solve these problems we have Jquery plugin for translator. You can download this at http://jquery-translate.googlecode.com/files/jquery.translate-1.3.9.min.js. It internally uses Google translator API and applies the above discussed logic and gives us the complete translated html. This takes the complex part and leave us a simplest part to translate complete web page.

The below code will do complete translation of your web page from source language to destination language

$('body').translate( srcLang, destLang );

Eg: $('body').translate( "en", "es"); //translates text from English to Spanish

But to get it working you also need to make sure you have Jquery along with this plugin.

You can also try playing with this plugin and see how it works. Please take a look at http://jsbin.com/emufo/edit and make any changes you want and preview the behavior by clicking Preview link on top left corner.