{"id":683,"date":"2012-10-17T13:55:40","date_gmt":"2012-10-17T12:55:40","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greenschoolsonline.co.uk\/blog\/?p=683"},"modified":"2018-10-30T15:26:29","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T15:26:29","slug":"google-translate-for-school-websites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.greenhouseschoolwebsites.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2012\/10\/google-translate-for-school-websites\/","title":{"rendered":"Google Translate for School Websites"},"content":{"rendered":"

Adding Google Translate to your school website\u00a0will allow your parents whose first language is not English to instantly translate a page into their native language.\u00a0(Well, hopefully their native languages are included in the 100 currently supported<\/a> and available for translation).<\/p>\n

We’ve recently seen\u00a0a\u00a0strong upsurge in interest from schools who wish to add the\u00a0Google translator to\u00a0their\u00a0website.\u00a0Anecdotally,\u00a0schools have told us that Ofsted see it as a useful aid to parental engagement for those schools with parents whose first language is not English. The good news is that we can add it for free if you ask us at the design stage.<\/p>\n

\"Translate\"<\/a>
\nFor the user, the process is simple; they select their desired language from a dropdown list and the page instantly appears in that language.\u00a0How does this magic work?\u00a0Well, a lot better than it did when it first appeared in 2006, when it was rule based and outsourced. Since 2007 it has used a process called Statistical Machine Translation, and because of the statistical learning techniques involved it’s been getting better and better since.<\/p>\n

Basically billions of words of text with known translations were analysed and statistical rules built. The original sources were UN documents which were routinely translated into 6 languages. Since then Google have used a combination of\u00a0its\u00a0own search data and also feedback from\u00a0its\u00a0own translations. In fact anyone can suggest a better translation. There’s a great video here:
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