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.)