Confessions of the Professions is dropping Google Translator
July 3, 2014 — Confessions of the Professions has made the decision to drop Google Translate. It has actually been gone from the site for a few days now, did you notice? We added it exactly one year ago in July of 2013. We thought it would be a good idea to add it in order to help bridge the gap in our language barrier with our visitors that were not originally from the United States and do not speak a lot of English. We thought that we would offer this free service to visitors who wanted a basic understanding of what they were reading. We have visitors from across Mexico, to South America, Western and Eastern Europe, Asia, and a few places in Africa. We appreciate all of our visitors and we wish we spoke your language and could translate every page on this website into your language. We feel if we continue to use Google Translate or any translator on our website, we would be doing a disservice to all of our visitors. As a result, we are removing Google Translate from our website completely with no replacement translator.
Unfortunately, Google Translate, as well as almost all online translators, are hardly reliable. The technology is still far behind and messages are not translated correctly, often leading to sentences that make no sense, or embarrassing words or phrases that should not have been translated the way they were translated. We feel this is not a good way of offering up pages to be translated for you. While we would have no idea how a page reads after it is translated, we feel that more often than not, the translations are very weak and are not conveying enough information to be read properly, or are revealing information that does not make sense. Most online translators no longer offer entire website translations services any longer. While Google Translator seemed like it could do the job, translating an entire website all at once seemed to be too easy for it to do, and it most likely resulted in plenty of text getting lost in translation, losing the value of the original content. Many wars have been started this way.
In reviewing the Google Analytics statistics for Confessions of the Professions, only about 8% of visitors that have come to this website have actually used the Google Translator. We did not keep it up top for visitors to easily find and this may have played a role in the little use of the translator, but we did continue to offer it on the sidebar for a year from July 2013 until the end of the month of June 2014. While we do take pride in our website by making sure it is delivered to you as quick as possible, being served on an optimized server, with optimized images, serving up cached pages, minifying all HTML, CSS, and Javascript, and doing everything we can to ensure you receive only fast speeds from our website when reading confessions, we could not help but feel that having the Google Translate Javascript code on our website was most likely slowing down the deliverance to you.
For the time being, you will only have the option to view the website in English. If we get enough requests to revert our decision and put the Google Translator back, we will be happy to do so, but we feel there are not enough visitors – or return visitors – using the Google translation services. Please feel free to let us know if this has caused you any inconvenience.
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