Earn Money Online Blog

Global Translator Plugin for Wordpress and Google Adsense

I’ve made use of the Global Translator Plugin for Wordpress for some time now across several of my sites and among other things I have found that I do get quite a bit of international traffic from it. I also notice that as it builds the translation of your site you will start getting internationalized ads which is good (nothing worse than a page in Spanish or French and English language ads, you KNOW that’s not effective for your earnings.)

I doubt I’m making an awful lot of money off of the other languages because I suspect that English language ads to the US/Canada UK and Australia/New Zealand are probably the best paying ad groups.

That much said, the concept of targeted ads that Google has promoted with Adwords and Adsense says to me that there should be good potential there, so I feel as though I’m leaving “money on the table” as they say by not enabling the global translator. I have learned a few things that I want to pass along as cautionary tales.

The biggest item is this…. did you know that it’s against the Adsense terms of use to show adsense ads on a page that is written in an unsupported language? I’ve read the terms myself it is. (The kind of thing you could get banned for although I haven’t heard anyone claim that was something they were banned for.)

So, here is the list of languages that you want to be certain you do not show ads with…. (I’ve just disabled these translations.) Hindi, Catalan, Filipino, Indonesian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Slovenian, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Albanian, Estonian, Galician, Maltese.

These were not supported by adsense as of my last check in April, but were supported by the Google Translation engine that Global translator can make use of.

I’d also suggest that you set your translations to never time out. That way you can just accumulate a translation of the site. Global translator will invalidate or expire a cached translation if you edit a page anyway, I really don’t see any other good reason to retranslate pages from time to time unless you have rss feeds that are pulled in, or just think they may make a better translation in another few months.

All in all, I have enjoyed having the translations onsite, I have had one message complaining that the translation in Dutch was incomprehensible, but outside of that I’ve not had complaints. I should say that it has altered my writing style when I give it thought. I have seen some of the things that give machine translation problems and if I keep it in mind I will try to write in a clearer, easier to translate manner.

The last item is that I’ve had a few problems with the global translator (mostly breakage in dealing with Google), but usually updating the plugin to the latest release (and setting longer times between each connection to the translation engine) will solve that. Currently Most of my sites will not connect to get a new translation more often than 1800 seconds. (A couple I have set to 3600 seconds.)

–Update– August 21, 2009

Google Adsense has expanded to Latvian, Ukrainian and Lithuanian so I’ve removed those from the list above.

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