automatic language translation and SEO

Question

I'm looking into translating a large UK English site into a number of other european languages. I was wondering what are the free options out there for automatic translation?

Also, in regards to SEO, how do search engines treat language copies of web pages in regards to the duplicate content rules?

Thanks

Answer 1

If someone finds this question nowadays, know that today there are multiple free and paid translation tools that can be used, and about the duplicate content because of the other languages, you can set up metatags to tell that your content has alternate languages and tell the search engines which one is the cannonical content, you can have a look at it in Google Documentation for examples:

https://developers.google.com/search/docs/specialty/international/localized-versions

Answer 2

You'd be better off hiring translators to write language specific versions that aren't simply translated versions of your English copy. You'll end up with better results, too.

The majority of your audience can probably understand English well enough to navigate your site, so I think you might be putting too much thought into this.

Answer 3

My limited experience in the matter is that the big G treats automatic language translation as duplicate content. It seems that the DC detection algorithms are language-agnostic. However, when I hand-translate into languages that I know, the 'new' pages rate highly. In fact, I would say that translating highly-rated (PR 4 and above) pages leads to better-performing pages (more search engine landings, and more varied terms as well) then even new original-content pages.

I have done no comparisons in this regard to other search engines, as they typically supply less than 10-20% of my traffic anyway.