On-the-fly Translation Widgets

There are situations where a fully-fledged multilingual website is not desired for many reasons, usually related to cost and maintenance overhead. However, there are also situations where having multiple languages for a website is desirable to reach a bigger audience or required by law (such as for government agencies). In these situations, on-the-fly machine translation can be a low-cost solution to satisfy these needs.

On-the-fly translation widgets enable real-time text translation without requiring the user to manually copy and paste text into a separate translation tool.

Until 2019, the Google Translate widget was the go-to solution for automated, on-the-fly page translations, but this solution was deprecated. Today, it is only allowed for certain educational and governmental websites that already had the service before 2019.

Fortunately, a couple of alternatives use the same embedded widget model for on-the-fly automated translations. These alternatives mostly use the same Google Translate API infrastructure and, in some cases, use more modern AI-based solutions. This blog post will examine two alternatives to the Google Translate widget: the Elfsight Website Translation Widget and the GTranslate widget.

Elfsight Website Translation Widget

Elfsight offers many ready-made widgets you can integrate into your website. They cover social media, reviews, e-commerce, chats, forms, etc. Among all these widgets, Elfsight offers the Website Translation widget, which you can use for on-the-fly translation of individual webpages. This widget can be customized from the Elfsight Dashboard, where you can choose the languages to show in the control and select a template for the appearance of the language chooser. You can then generate the code you embed into your site’s HTML code wherever needed. Elfsight offers a free tier with limited page views and a minimally customizable appearance (with Elfsight branding). Paid tiers offer more page views and appearance customization without Elfsight’s branding.

Features

• Templates can change the look and feel, and custom CSS can be used to customize the widget's appearance fully.

• It can include custom JavaScript to control certain widget behaviors.

• An Elfsight account is needed to access the Dashboard and edit the widget.

• A dashboard that offers a visual preview of the widget.

• More than 100 languages and dialects are supported.

• Tutorials are included to help embed the widget in over 20 CMS and e-commerce platforms.

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• Paid versions include support for installing (i.e., embedding) the widget in your website.

• According to Elfsight’s website, Google AI is the underlying translation technology, so this is an AI-based machine translation solution.

Pricing

Elfsight has four tiers: one free and three paid. The latest pricing information can always be found after logging into the Elfsight dashboard, but that page is behind a login, so here is a summary of the pricing tiers:

• Free tier: can be used in any website (unlimited websites), limited to 200 page views (after a page that has the widget embedded is viewed more than 200 times, the widget will deactivate), a single widget (you can only create one version of the widget and use it in all your pages/sites), Elfsight branding in the widget.

• Basic tier: $4/month, includes unlimited websites, 5,000 page views, three widgets, advanced customizations (Elfsight’s team can help you with customizing the widget’s appearance to your website’s needs), free installation service (Elfsight’s team can help you embed the widget in your website), basic support, ad-free (i.e., no Elfsight branding)

• Pro tier: $8/month, includes unlimited websites, 50,000 page views, nine widgets, three projects (you can organize the widgets you create into different projects in the Dashboard), one collaborator (you can invite a user to collaborate in the creation/editing of the widgets), advanced customizations, free installation service, priority support, ad-free.

• Premium tier: $16/month, includes unlimited websites, 150,000 page views, 21 widgets, nine projects, three collaborators, widget sharing (you can share your widgets with third parties such as clients and collaborators), advanced customizations, free installation service, priority support, and live chat, ad-free.

GTranslate

Unlike Elfsight that offers not only the Website Translation Widget but other widgets as well, GTranslate offers exclusively a translation widget and service. Like Elfsight’s solution, you can configure a widget and generate code to embed into the HTML of your website’s pages. Instead of using templates to modify the appearance, GTranslate offers a form where you can configure the different visual aspects of the widget, including the list of target languages. A preview allows you to see how the final widget will appear. Besides HTML-embeddable code, GTranslate offers native plugins for several open-source CMSs, including Shopify.

Features

• Form-driven appearance editor with preview functionality.

• No account is needed to get the free version of the widget.

• More than 100 languages and dialects are supported.

• Native plugins offered for Joomla!, Drupal, WordPress, and Shopify.

• The free version uses Google Translate API, and the paid versions offer AI-based technology.

• Higher paid tiers offer URL translation and hosting of translated content in international domains for better SEO.

Pricing

GTranslate offers one free tier, three fixed paid tiers, and one customizable paid tier. Updated details can be found on GTranslate's pricing page, but here is a summary of the different tiers:

• Free tier: offers translation for all languages supported by the widget, does not have limits for page views and words, and uses Google Translate API as the underlying translation technology.

• Startup tier: $19.99/month, includes translation of all languages, unlimited page views and words, search engine indexing (i.e., Google and other search engines will be able to find translated content from your website), and translations can be edited. The underlying translation technology is AI-based (GTranslate calls this “neural translations”). Translations are delivered using a CDN for increased performance.

• Business tier: $29.99/month. This includes all the features from the previous tier, plus URL translation to improve SEO.

• Enterprise tier: $39.99/month, includes all the features from the previous tiers plus language hosting (using international top-level domains to deliver the translated content to simulate a multilingual website).

• Custom tier: starting at $9.99/month for the same features as the Startup tier but only for translation of a single language (i.e., for bilingual websites). Customizable features are: bilingual or all languages, URL translation, and language hosting. This allows you to have only the needed features and pay less than the Business or Enterprise tiers.

Wrapping Up

Although the Google Translate widget is deprecated and unavailable for most users, the new alternatives offer similar functionality, plus the ability to customize the visual appearance of the widget (the original Google Translate widget had Google branding all over it) and use more modern underlying translation technologies based on AI. Elfsight’s free version is limited and recommended only for development and testing; you must pay to go beyond the limits. GTranslate, on the other hand, has an unlimited free version, but the translated results might be slower and of a lower quality because it uses the traditional Google Translate API. You must pay if you want better quality translations and better performance.