UPDATE: This product is now outdated, and is no longer available. I have removed the links from this article. Multilingual Marketer was an absolutely brilliant idea and worked beautifully for awhile. My understanding is that the translation engine started blocking all queries from such software. Meanwhile Google continued to develop their translation engine, and eventually integrated translation into their own web browser years later. To get the most up-to-date information and recommendations, please join my free newsletter.
Eric’s Tips: Edition #7 – 11/20/2005
Multilingual Marketer is a website translation program designed by Kelvin Hui, owner Ambatch software. I’ve been using it for a few weeks now, so I’ve got a good feel for what the program can and can’t do. First of all, let me just say it’s a brilliant idea. There are a lot of text translation tools out there, but this is the first consumer-grade product I’ve seen that is specifically designed to allow webmasters to automatically translate multiple web pages into other languages.
Clearly, the potential for gaining online market-shares of your niche in other (non-English) languages is currently a huge opportunity. This is one of those products I was hesitant to publicly review, because I’d rather not have any competition, but after thinking about it I don’t think I have too much to worry about. Why not? Because most people (particularly Americans) seem to have a fairly narrow world view, and they’re not too concerned about reaching people outside their own cultural sphere. Even among those of you who read this review, I’m guessing the thought of international marketing will only sound appealing to a small handful.
The fact is that there are largely untapped markets out there beyond the realm of the English language. Whereas it is difficult to achieve a top search result ranking in a competitive niche, it may be much easier to achieve a high ranking in another language.
OK, so how does Multilingual Marketer help you do this? It can essentially translate an entire website into any of 12 different languages at the touch of a button. A cool application of this technology is to incorporate Google AdSense. When you run AdSense on a page in another language, Google will automatically detect the language and display ads in that language. That means you can easily make money from those pages, even if you don’t know the language yourself, and don’t have the time to seek out advertisers and/or products in that language.
How does it do that? I haven’t attempted to dissect the software, nor have I asked Kelvin about it, but I believe it uses a translation engine such as Altavista’s Babelfish (owned by Yahoo). This is the same engine used by many online page translation services. Unfortunately, that’s also a slight problem I’ve seen with the software. Since it rapidly requests translations from the engine, and essentially screen scrapes the results, the translation server will block your attempts after awhile. I’m usually able to get through about 20 pages before I start getting blocked. In fact, I believe the actual Babelfish site is being utilized, because if I go there and attempt to manually translate one page after running Multilingual Marketer, I receive error messages from Yahoo.
The only other negative aspect I can think of is the somewhat inaccurate translations. Obviously a machine translated page will lack the legibility of a human translated page. Nevertheless, I feel it is good enough for most websites (obviously you wouldn’t want to translate something like how-to perform a tracheostomy), and at least good enough for the search engines.
All that said, is it worth it? I bought it for $67.00, the current price for version 1.0. I’m only able to translate about 20 pages a day, but for $67 I’d still say its worth it. If Kelvin ever gets around to upgrading to 2.0 and addresses the IP blocking issue, the program could be worth its weight in gold. It comes with free upgrades for life, so I feel its also worth the investment just in case a better version is released.
By the way, the Babelfish engine is powered by SYSTRAN, who has dedicated translation servers available. This means that the possibility exists to set up your own server to run a program such as Multilingual Marketer uninhibited by frequency constraints. I’d start one up myself, but like I said I just don’t think enough people really care about marketing to people in other languages. On the other hand, if you get inspired by this review and decide to make a project out of it, let me know! I’d be very interested in partnering in something like that.
Can this product be used to translate WordPress blogs? Or would it not be able to handle the database where the posts are stored? Thanks.
I don’t think it would spider the blog and translate every page. You could translate the pages one at a time, but it doesn’t do translations on the fly, like being able to set it up on your site and it translates all new content as it arrives. Now THAT would be sweet! Imagine blogging, and your every post is automatically translated into 12 languages on your site. Honestly, I would not doubt if Kelvin already has that technology and is just keeping it for himself. In fact he’s currently doing over a million dollars a year in AdSense income, and I’m going to be talking about it in a couple days in my inner circle.
Hi Eric,
Thanks for the info on backend engine of it. I was planning to use on my adsense informaiton website, like applecampus.com, an ‘old’ pr6 website, which was in Korean before. And better yet, use on my own IT website newit.us to attract local customers that speak different languages. I’d like to code on the similar project to overcome its problem. I already knew a method to take care its limitation. You may email me for further partnership detail. Thanks.
Forgot to mention I was wondering the software has internet access requirement.
Hi Eric,
Thank you for your honest review. I intend to purchase it, too but turn-off by negative comments by other users – and lack of support from its creator.
Im not really sure about it but, like you, i believe there are huge potential for this product.
Hope Kevin will come out with his version 2 and see how it goes…..
Jerry Navarro
seems to be worthy idea of buying this script.