I have a blog in foreign language and with only 4 own articles. I was thinking to add for every 4 new unique articles also 4 creative common licenced articles from other sites but translate it to this foreign language using google translate tool.
Do you think that Google will detect that I was using google translate tool? Do you think it has some measure which detects that article was translated by using automated tool?
The question is only about SEO. Leave user perspective questions for now because I would use this only for testing to see how difficult is to get serp to know if I will invest some money for proper content or not.
Thank you
Well it depends on how you’re posting the translated content. Are you posting all articles in one language and simply offering a button to translate them? Are you translating the articles and then posting them in the translated language?
If your blog has a multi-lingual audience I would recommend translating your articles and then posting them to different versions of your site. For instance:
yourblog.com/en-uk
yourblog.com/de
yourblog.com/sp
You can designate these different parts of your website as a canonical so that Google doesn’t potentially treat them as duplicate content. Here’s Google’s guide on that: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2009/02/specify-your-canonical.html
You would point the canonical articles back to the default language of your blog.
EDIT: Sorry, I totally missed the last sentence in the Original Post.
I wouldn’t really advise using Google Translate for actual web content. It’s fine to use it as a utility to offer visitors from other countries, as they will know that the content has simply been translated automatically. But including it on a page where it simply looks like actual content will look bad for your site (given that the content it produces isn’t at all accurate).
Disclaimer: I’m fluent in English and speak enough Spanish and German to find the bathroom and possibly order myself a sandwich. Pretty limited here.
When you say that Google Translate isn’t at all accurate, what exactly do you mean? I’ve used Google Translate to translate websites written in other languages such as French and had no problems understanding the result. In fact, it read perfectly natural. Now I understand that there are a lot of factors here and it depends on the complexity of the source language. Just curious if you have any examples.
Also, keep in mind that any images with text won’t translate. This is another reason to use my suggestion of multiple versions of your website so you can translate them for your users.
Google Translate cannot understand context of languages, it literally translates on a word by word basis, this isn’t so much an issue with straight forward languages, however languages with lot’s of nuances like Russian, Chinese or Arabic will be next to impossible to translate in a fluent style. There’s been lots of threads about this before, less to say that it’s no substitute for professional translation, and used in a “professional” capacity - like selling something, it’ll make you look rather clueless (in the same way as asking someone with an English phrasebook to sound their way through a sales pitch). 