September 20th , 2009 → 11:21 am @ admin // No Comments
Weymouth and Portland reaches out to the world in preparation for the 2012 London Olympic Games when the borough hosts the sailing events at The Weymouth and Portland National Sailing Academy.
The VisitorsWeymouth.co.uk website has for the past week been adding translations of it’s current pages in twenty different languages. All these translated pages actually exist as pages on the VisitorsWeymouth.co.uk server a great advantage over many websites that simply offer their users the opportunity to translate pages “on the fly” using online translation services like Google Translate.
Why is it such an advantage?
Pages translated “on the fly” don’t physically exist. They are created when a user requests them but as a one time action. The translated pages created on VisitorsWeymouth.co.uk are actual physical pages with their own web URL. Once created they can be viewed by anyone as any normal web page and the translation process is not carried out again.
To date we have over 800* pages translated and stored. They exist in twenty different languages and are all visible to search engines. In time they will be indexed on Google etc in the same way as the English pages will be. There are actually a few pages indexed on Google already in one or two different languages but it’s early days and we expect it to be at least another three months or so before all of them are there and starting to show up in searches.
This is all very positive try this Google Search now that will show you the pages in the index so far and you will see foreign translations there. In time people carrying out searches in their own language version of Google will start to see our sites pages in their results.
* bear in mind that the site is still in it’s pre-launch stage and currently has a very limited number of english language pages anyway. We will be adding content to the site over the next 3 months and also giving most businesses in the area who need to connect with visitors the chance to add their own content. We plan to have boosted the english language content by a factor of 15 by January 2010. This would result in availability of 12,000 international content pages in addition to the english at around the same time.
With Weymouth, Portland and South Dorset very much on the world stage during the next three years we see this as a very positive step in promoting the area …
