Fixing My Global Translator Blues
When it comes to the Wordpress Global Translator Plugin, I feel like such a loser. You can use it on your blog(s) without any problems, once you activate it and then update your permalink structure. The last step is crucial. Never let it be said that I'm anywhere in the vicinity of perfect when it comes to telling you about these things.
I originally mentioned the plugin in my article, Use A Translation Plugin To Get More Readers!, and I was absolutely right about that. The number of readers from non-English speaking countries increased tremendously. That readership base continued to grow and my Alexa statistics proved it as my rank ultimately reached the 50K mark. With Alexa, lower is better.
I really screwed up when I disabled the translator. I wrote about it when I made some radical adjustments. Although the non-English speaking countries were the lowest amount of readers in percentage terms, the effect of cutting them off caused my Alexa rank to rise again (getting worse). It wasn't working right on my blog and I didn't know why and that's why I deactivated it.
I reactivated it, as I wrote in The Global Translator is Back on My Blog, after the plugin author contacted me. I then removed it again, as I mentioned briefly in my Blog Drive-Bys for 2007-07-17. I didn't want to make a big deal out it that time because I was thinking that I must have been doing something wrong. Every time I tested it, either there were layout errors or the translation service wouldn't cooperate, treating the queries as spam. Naturally, I made the mistaken assumption that comment spammers were abusing it. That wasn't true — it was happening because the queries from my blog were malformed.
While looking for answers, today I came across a post by Lorelle on WordPress that mentioned this plugin. I spotted, in the fourth comment, her note to go to Options, Permalinks, and Update Permalink Structure. I took a chance and reactivated the plugin and then did exactly that. Every error that I had previously seen and the problems with the translation services (Google and Alta Vista) disappeared. No changes to the .htaccess file needed to be made, but I had never gone through that step before and I don't know why it was required. I went back to the plugin author's site and it's not mentioned at all. (Correction: It's mentioned in the 0.6 change that it's automatic. Apparently, that isn't true in all cases.)
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I've been hesitant to do this because of the permalink updates. Does it mess with the default, existing links or just create new links for the other languages? It's very tempting, but I don't want to mess up our current URLs as I don't want to lose my Google love.
It doesn't do a thing to your current, existing links. It creates new links for the languages and the new ones have no effect on the old ones. The permalinks update that you do has no effect either, as long as you don't do anything after that.
Good to hear. Thanks for the explanation/reassurance, much appreciated.
Hiya RT. I was using global translator and it worked for a while. Then i changed themes or did something (we bloggers are always fiddling with something!) and one day i just clicked one of the flags and nothing happened. I tried re-installing etc but still nothing so i abandoned it cos it seemed like time wasted. When i read this in my feedreader i was overjoyed (perhaps i should save my joy in case it still doesn't work!). Will try using it again. Thanks. You never know where help will come from.
tried this plug-in once, and got it on my blog, but then once i clicked the flag no content is shown, i find solutions and even commented on the authors plug-in page but when I create comment, it doesn't go through, even posted on my blog about de-activating the plug-in, but then let us try again this time since I have a new host. Maybe host messes my blog
I was getting the "no content" result (blank page) with the "cache" feature enabled, and once I undid that it actually loads the page. Unfortunately it just loads English each time, so I'm not done with it yet.
Doublecheck your cache directory. If it's not writeable (i.e. permissions set to 777) it won't cache the translated page. I'm not sure if it would stop it from being displayed though.
RT, which option are you using? AltaVista's or Google's implementation? Now I see AV's is returning empty pages, but Google's just returns the page in English. Were either of those problems you experienced?
Thanks.
I'm using AV's right now because it has more languages. No, I never experienced blank pages. I would always get weird errors at the top of the page, even when the pages translated. Most of the time, via either AV or Google, I would get their infamous spamming message instead of the page.
It could also have something to do with the permalinks setting, because it has to be able to rewrite them on the fly.
I just looked at one of your URLs at Wild Bluff Media and the permalink has /ru/ inserted properly but it's still in English. Weird. Check your cache directory (copy some files to your HD) and see if any translated files are there and if they are, if any are NOT in English.
Yeah, the cache files are just the page code starting from the location of the plugin code. Kinda strange. So it's just the sidebars in the file. I've disabled it for now, but will have to revisit it later to see if I can get it working properly. Thanks for the tips.
I am fed up!
It's still not working and I've had enough. Have disabled the dang thing. My internet connection is not the fastest or most reliable in the world so I think I've wasted enough time trying to get it to work. Do you happen to know any other translation plugin that people are using that has fewer issues? Anyone? Thanks RT. You've done your best. Have a great day, hopefully a lot better than mine.
I'm sorry it won't work for you. It took me many tries (including this last one) to make it work the way it was designed to work.
Check out the post I linked to for Lorelle on WordPress. She listed a few others on there that you might want to try.
Thanks RT. Will do.
[...] Fixing My Global Translator Blues [...]
Free or not free, it is not a good thing to publish a plugin that doesn't work in all cases it says it works.
I have been trying on this about 3 hours and nothing seems to work.
I checked the cache folder and there I saw files with the path to babel wrapped around the path of the page I needed to be translated.
Yet it is not displayed in my blog. I get the address with /de/ or other language in the path but it shows all in English.
This is crap. As I looked around comments and discussions on this plugin more than 80% of cases show that this doesn't work.
It no longer works for me after the wp 2.3 upgrade. I just removed it. I won't be putting it back.
I bought the one from Taragana 1 minute ago.
http://blog.taragana.com/index.php/archive/angsumans-translator-plugin-pro-for-wordpress-blogs-released/
I hope that this one will work. It costs 30usd, yet I decided to invest on it.
It will be implemented into this:
http://www.the-preferred-guest.com
[...] my attempts to find a solution, I read many blog posts about how to fix the translator and get rid of the 403 server error, looked for alternatives, but eventually I figured that the [...]