I am thinking of dropping the language translation from this blog.
If you can read other languages besides English please take a look at some of the translated versions of this blog using the flag icons at the bottom of the home page. What do you think of the non-English versions of this blog? Are the translations really useful? Do they seem to get the point across?
For nearly years I have used Translation Gold on this and several other sites.
This translation script seem to work well from a software point of view. It translates the pages and saves them in a cache that can be found by search engines and indexed. I actually get a very high percentage of non-English visitors to this blog and the other sites and blogs I run the translation script on.
Why am I considering removing Translation Gold from this site?
I have a high number of bounced visitors.
The bounce percentage is definately higher on the translations. I would like to lower that percentage. While some translated pages rank fairly high, the traffic is not staying. This leads me to think the translations may not be that good anyway.
Poor ad performance.
Many advertisers only want English traffic. AdSense does not seem to perform very well on these pages either. It may be because of the translation or simply lack of demand for ads in those languages. To put it shortly, there’s no money in it.
Google has recently started to complain about the redirects in translated pages.
Google likes the pages themselves. Google does not like it when these pages have links that lead to pages that are blocked by robots.txt. This gives me errors in Google Webmaster Tools and simply makes me nervous. This may be due to the way the pages are cached and the robots.txt is made, but I do not have the skill needed to figure out how to make Google happy with this. Perhaps a better writted robots.txt would do it.
Translation Gold is no longer available.
I am not sure if it is still supported. It has worked very well and is a testament to good scripts. It may be time to stop using it though.
Please share your opinion of translation software with a comment below.
Please make the comment in English from the English version of the page. 
**Update**
As pointed out by Apollia in the comment below, the software is not working anymore. This answers my question and I have removed the software since it is now useless.
I also discovered that there was an extreme error in the comment section of the blog with a plugin blocking comments it should not have. I have disabled this plugin till I can make sure comments are working properly. Thanks for all those that have tried to comment and were not able to.
I kind of think take the translation off.
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Well, at first, I couldn’t figure out how to reach a translated page. I tried clicking the flag images at the top and bottom of your blog post, but, that didn’t do it.
So, it would probably be good to make the translation links more prominent. Until reading this blog post, I never even knew they were there.
Eventually, I noticed the flags at the very bottom of the page and clicked one. I can understand a little bit of French (though I’m not fluent), so I clicked the French flag.
Unfortunately, it brought me to a 403 Forbidden error page on Google, which said:
We’re sorry…
… but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can’t process your request right now. Etc.
It happened again each time I clicked a different flag.
So, unless that can be fixed, it looks like it might be useless to keep the translation links.
Best wishes,
Apollia
Thanks Apollia
Yes, the software has stopped working since I last checked it. I could have saved some time writing the post if I had checked it more recently.
My question is answered like you said. It’s useless so I’ll remove it.
Thanks very much for taking the time to check and recheck and comment.
You’re welcome! Thanks for all the interesting blog posts.
Best wishes,
Apollia
I think translation is important because not all are using english language.
I looked into adding translation to one of my sites but I could never find a clear answer as to whether Google like it or not.
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Does Google like translated content – I think yes. However, they do not like scripts that uses their translation service. There are some services that do not mind it, but I am not sure of a script that is easy to use and good for SEO purposes. The best bet may be to translate individual pages manually if you have a real purpose for it. You could use Google’s translation (time consuming) for this or hire a translator (probably a better choice but expensive).
I am glad to see you dropped the translations. I do not think they really do much for the blog owner. I never really thought these plugins worked very well. The translations are just not very good.
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Google likes translated content, but what personally feel is you need to have different pages in multiple languages.
Nice post, it really help me a lot,not a English speaker, so don’t mind my poor English, just want to say thanks, when I surfing online I often need a free translation software to help me to read English,
Google likes the translated content, but what I personally think there should be different pages in different languages.