The world is now on a shrinking spree to soon become a global village. In order to make your website truly international, it is nowadays very important to offer your content in other languages too besides English.

Machine Translation
A good way to make your site international is to add links for translation of the text with the use of a free machine translation service like Google’s Page Translator. They are used to convert the site’s text into another language.

However, translation is quite a difficult task, especially due to the difference in grammatical rules. The results of the translation are not exactly correct. It can be used in case of emergency, but it is not something that should be relied upon. Also, it does not work with interactive pages and the number of languages are very limited.

Hiring Translators
A better option than the machine translators are the professional translators which translate the content and navigation of the website into different languages. However, this method is quite expensive if done for a number of languages and hence out of the reach of most small companies. So, most small websites translate their text into the language spoken by the maximum number of its visitors.

Volunteer Translators
In case your website offers something that is of interest to a lot of people, some people may volunteer to translate in for free. All you need to do is to give an encouragement message on the page asking for help with translation. You can also offer incentives such as free products or membership to them in return.

However, the translation done by the volunteers is not at par with the professionals, but is readable and quite better than machine translation. You can also invite feedback from the readers and depending on it, you can decide whether the translated text should be kept on the website or removed. Sometimes, visitors correct the translation too and it can be used to improve it further.

Deciding What to Send
Letting the users chose their country or preferred language is a big mistake. In case their country or language is not listed, it is both annoying and insulting for the user. In fact, there is not need for this as the browser sends the settings for the user’s language and location to the site in HTTP Headers. All that is required is a little scripting.