Re: Google Translator - How to translate button text.
Mike Duffy
news:Xns9C5CC8FCA8044re...@94.75.244.51:
> Mike Duffy <res...@invalid.invalid> wrote in
> news:Xns9C5C1C00FDC5re...@94.75.244.51:
>
>
>>
>> Here is the example: http://pages.videotron.com/duffym/
>
> I decided to go ahead and fix it like I comtemplated. This is just a
> 'warning' to all that my traffic is low enough that I usually debug
> with the real website, so don't be put off too much by spurious
> 'alerts' etc.
>
For those who use NNTP with low retention servers, (and those using
alt.www.authoring) the original problem was how to cause Google to
translate button labels and text within javascript-generated content,
such as default values for form text areas and alert boxes. I beieve
that Google offers a commercial web-based API to do this, but I wanted a
way to do it that would not cost me money.
The fix is to use named divs at the top of the page that are presented
with an invisible text format [1]. Then, you use the page "onload" event
to re-populate your text fields with material from the divs, which will
be translated text.
I fixed the problem as I described I would, but it still does not work
perfectly. Sometimes (but not always), the last few sentences in the
page remain in English.
The problem seems to be worse for long pages. It was only happening for
my poetry page, so I removed a half a dozen poems until it seemed to
work at first glance. Here is the url [2]:
http://pages.videotron.com/duffym/poetry.htm
If you click on one of the small flags at the top of the page, it will
submit the current page to the Google translation service. But for some
languages, the first time you do it, the last one or two sentences in
the orange paragraph at the bottom stay in english. When this happens,
the two white heading lines:
Causes I support: / Share this page via:
will also remain in english. However, if you click on "View / Reload"
(FF)" or "View / Refresh (IE)", the entire page is shown properly. When
the problem happens, it is always entire sentences that remain in
english, it never happens part-way through a sentence.
This is not a "solid" problem so I do not see how I can debug it. As far
as I can tell, it has to with caching, but not on MY machine, rather the
caches in the Google internal network that they use to reduce bandwith
by making copies of pages that are popular targets for being translated
into other languages. (In the past, I have seen 12 hour old prior copies
of files that end up being translated instead of the files I have just
written to the server. I suspect that this behaviour may be related to
the current problem.)
Does anyone have any other ideas about what might be causing my problem?
Is there a limit on how much text can be translated at a time?
[1] I know that Google "frowns" upon using invisible text because of the
way spammers load up porno pages with invisible technical terms. It
seems that they believe that all they need to do is surprise a computer
nerd with a few seconds of porn and he will be ready to give out his
credit card numbers to see more.
[2] Yes, I know that translating poetry will always break up the rhyming
scheme.