Is translating your site into multiple languages a good strategy?

[RockbetJohn]

My thoughts on translation would be that if you have flags for say France, Spain etc... then link directly to those sites like titan for Spanish. My next suggestion would be to have just a single page of links explaining in that language a quick rundown of those sites and what they have to offer. Have it translated which should be cheap and only have to do it once plus it adds content to your site. I personally don't like the auto translations myself but I still think it's better than not doing it at all.

[Planet Mark]

Here is what confuses me about this whole debate... (note: adapted from a (longer)personal blog post from last week)

So, first let us take the example of a keen and hardworking chap from China (not picking on China particularly - just an example) who hears that there is money to be made in poker and decides to produce 100 pages full of something like this:

Online Poker Game offer you virtual way of enjoy poker game through the Internet. Though a bit difficulty, this game can be masterful in due course. Online players can number of times until they feeling they have mastered the game.

Pages and pages...

Banners ensure that he gets a couple of conversions in the first month (after all, so many long tail keywords via his 'spinning software' he can not miss).... great! Now time for 1000 more pages this month and 2000 next etc etc

Stop for a moment here.

This guy is nothing but a spammer right? He is taking gibberish English and filling up the web with it in the name of making a few dollars... nothing too controversial about this statement I would hope!


Now, a couple of questions.

What is the difference between what this guy is doing and what those of you using auto-translate software to fill the web with gibberish in other languages are doing?

What makes this guy a 'spammer' and someone else a 'reputable' poker webmaster who is 'exploring new revenue streams'??

I have no problem with anybody who is honest here.

If you are going to do this then why not stand proud and say 'alongside my legitimate affiliate activity I spam in multiple languages to increase my income'??

What gets to me is the various denials, the various justifications as to why this it is somehow 'ok' to fill the world with spam in many languages... this is an excellent debate, but somehow there is a disconnect going on for me!

Cheers, Mark

[Spry]

well, for certain if i were try try auto-translations (very doubtful) that it would be on a throw-away domain.

[Viriatu]

reading this all thread made me come in to say to all joomla users there is a plugin that allows to translate single page of your content BY HANDso you can just publish when you have the time\money and not depend on BS translators... i will update this on the joomla tutorial pretty soon because i have been doing some research on this....

[actyper]

Cool please let me know when you have this done, would be interested in doing translating on one of my joomla sites.