How to Use Google Translate for English/Spanish Translation

This is how I use Google Translate to translate my English hubs in to Spanish so that my partner can read them. He can neither speak nor read English, and while I have managed to learn to speak Spanish, it would be too difficult for me to translate a whole hub, many of which are well over 1000 words long, into Spanish so that he can read them too.

It took me a while to work out how to do it quickly and easily, and so I thought I'd share it with you. You never know when you want a whole hub to be changed into a foreign language for the benefit of someone who doesn't read English.

I used to just go open google, then click on language tools, then insert the text I wanted translated, choose the language and click a button, and it all gets translated.

Else, put the url of the website into the Translate a Web Page box in google language tools, then read the page that came up.

Here is step by step the old way.

Open google.com or whatever browser country version you get. Note how mine is pushing for me to go to Google espana with a reminder on the bottom left of page. (That's because I live in Spain).

To the right of the search bar is Advanced Search or Language Tools. Click on Language Tools.

A box will come up where you can insert the text to wish to be translated, plus choices of from and to languages. I chose English to Spanish.

After clicking the translate button, you get the text translated below, and in bigger letters than the original

Or, you can use the Translate a Web Page option, insert the url of the site you want to be translated, and after a moment or two, depending on your internet speed, your page will be translated.

Remember to set your languages first. There is a huge list.

Here you can now see my whole hub in Spanish. It is not a perfect translation because if you look closely there are always one or two words that don't translate, like 'showbars', but it is in the main readable and the Spanish reader certainly gets the gist of the content.

Oh and the adverts didn't change into Spanish, these are the ones I normally get!

To me this a long-winded way of doing things. It mean opening a new page of google each time, because the tools are only on the front page when you open it. If you have already been using google to search for other things, you will not see the language tools option, and have to reopen a fresh page.

What I do is I go to google.es, and type in either the name of my hub or search terms relating to it.

If you look at the search result above you see a translate this page option. It actually says Traducir esta pagina, but you could guess what it is even if you don't know Spanish. Click on that, and you get the same result as above, but hey ...isn't this way so much easier?

And of course it doesn't have to be in Spanish. Go to google.fr and get it in French...

or German? (google.de)

This is so easy. All you have to find is the name of the country that speaks the language you wish your hub or website to be translated into, and go to the search engine google.whatever, find your website or type in its name, and the translate page button is always to the right of the site name, in brackets.

Google themselves have a list of all the country codes you would need.

While this is maybe of no interest to most of you just now, who knows when you might meet someone from a foreign country who wants to see your work?

Now you too can easily change the language of your hubs.

However, do not to tempted to take a foreign language site and translate it into English for the purpose of plagiarising the work of someone else (albeit in a foreign language), because the translate tool simply isn't good enough. You would still have to completely re-write the article just to get it to make sense.

Several foreign language people have tried that on Hubpages already, and it shows in their work.