Microsoft Translator Widget integrates with Drupal

This is so cool. I found what I have been looking for. The MS Translator Widget. It is free and can easily be integrated into a Drupal site via the Widgets module. This isn’t quite how I am going to use it but here are before and after screen shots from my front page. The first is the site as a spanish speaker would see it after login. You can see that it is already in spanish except for the content in the middle. these are the RSS feed stories that come in all the time. At the top right you can see the widget for the MS translator. I was able to get this up and running in no time at all using the widgets module.

I’ll post tomorrow how i configed the widgets module.

This is what it look like after I translate the page via the widget. All of the spanish text is left alone (except for the language drop down “Languages”… not sure will have to check but I think I know…) but the english teasers of the RSS stories are now translated. My spanish is good enough for me to be able to tell that the translation is pretty good. and free. There are some additional options for the widget that include auto translation, transparent to the user, and others. auto translation is generally not embraced because machine translation is generally about 70% correct. But, by translating the interface through the Drupal tools and using this widget, I believe that I can deliver a true multilingual site. and that is very cool.