I have started working on Taragana's Automatic Machine Translation Plugin Version 2. Here is an update on the progress. This is your chance to voice your requirements and priorities. No promises however.

New features:
Like it's predecessor, it provides automatic real-time machine translation of your WordPress Blog (written in English Language) in eight additional languages - Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Japanese, Korean and Chinese (Simplified). The translated pages can be bookmarked.

Sometime after the original plugin was released, Google tweaked their translation service backend. After their tweak only the first page was being translated. Any linked page would show up in English and you would have to click on the appropriate icon again. That is an inconvenience to say the least. I would like it to automatically ensure that all subsequent pages on the site are also available in translated version when you click on them.

This feature has been implemented. Now you have to click on your nation/language icon only once and you can browse the site in your preferred language. In fact currently the plugin is providing you with a translated version of the whole web when you follow the links. I will subsequently limit it to the site only to prevent resource abuse.

To do:

  1. Make the plugin internationalization ready. I would appreciate if you could help me in providing translation of few phrases in any of the non-English languages and/or with testing non-English versions. Please contact me at angsuman[at]taragana[dot]com if you are interested in helping.
  2. Explore the option to provide versions for other non-English blog languages like Spanish. Let me know your choice of non-English blog languages. Currently it only supports blogs in English language. That should change.
  3. Package in a single directory for convenience.
  4. One-click installable.
  5. Explore the possibility to allow fancy urls like http://blog.taragana.com/spanish/. WordPress architecture is too hardcoded as far as I can see for a clean solution. The only option I can see so far is using .htaccess. Any ideas on this issue will be appreciated.
  6. Configurability for different layout, english language flag etc.

There are few more additional enhancements, to be mentioned later.

Misc:
On non-English pages the flag icons sometimes convert to strange string like $$~. I can see this weirdness originating from the translation service provider. I haven't yet thought about a decent way to address this problem. Status: Pending, possibly unsolvable.

I have explored the possibility to provide translation individually to blog entries instead of translating the whole page at one pass, as someone suggested. However I couldn't see any good use cases for this feature. Status: Rejected.