Whats4Eats Speaks Your Language
Given that Whats4Eats is a website with international recipes, it's no wonder that we get visitors from around the world too. The Philippines, India, Germany, Mexico — they are all big sources of traffic for the website. Not all Whats4Eats visitors speak English as their first language. So now we have a tool that can help you.
UPDATE: We have since removed the tool from the sidebar. Our visitors who need translation services seem to be saavy enough to find their own way to the translation tool or simply browse within Google Translate. So we went ahead and freed up that space on our sidebar for other things!
Google (of course Google) has come up with a widget called Google Translate. It allows you to translate any webpage into the language of your choice. You can then browse the whole website in Hindi, Farsi, French, Polish or Japanese. Hover over the text, and the original English pops up.
The tool isn't perfect. It does its best translating in Romance languages (French, Spanish, Italian). Other languages will spit out their share of gibberish. But the translations should give at least the gist of how to make a recipe. And the hover function allows you to submit your own translation if you think you can do better.
It's also imperfect in other ways. It appears to take you off the main website and on to Google, so we don't know yet if we get credit for the pages you view or any of the ads you might click. (We gotta make money, you know!). Also, it's difficult getting back to the main English website. If you click on the "View original web page" link at the top of the screen, it takes you to one of our ads. Weird! We're working on that. In the meantime, you'll have to retype the website address in the address bar to get back.
We're testing it right now only on recipe pages. So give Google Translate a try and let us know how it works for you.
-- Chef Brad
