In March of 2013 Taylor & Francis embedded the Google Translate widget onto all journal abstract and aims and scope pages on our journals platform, Taylor & Francis Online. The widget appears at the top of these pages. By clicking on the widget users can select from 80 languages to translate the page into ().
The aim of this addition was to enable foreign language speakers to easily translate the pages, allowing them to quickly get a sense of an article's content or a journal's aims and scope, before going on to invest additional time in translating-and-reading an article or submitting a manuscript.
The Google Translate algorithms are based on statistical analysis. Put simply, this means that Google Translate looks for translation patterns in a large corpus of text and then makes an intelligent guess at what a translation should be (https://sites.google.com/site/ttuandyjustin/how-did-they-crack-it/google-translation-methodology). These translations can have errors, but can still succeed in giving a sense of the original text to the reader (http://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1122&context=ciima). Because of the potential for errors, Taylor & Francis decided not to include the Google Translate widget on article full text pages at this time; those errors could lead to a misrepresentation of the article, which was a cause for concern.
The widget has been a popular feature on Taylor & Francis Online. In the first 18 months of being embedded on the platform, the widget was used over 1.2 million times. The top 10 languages used have remained largely the same over this 18-month period: Chinese (PRC), Spanish, Chinese (Taiwan), Farsi, Japanese, Portuguese, French, Korean, German and Arabic. shows the top 10 languages used in the first six months of the widget being embedded, from March through August 2013 and shows the top 10 languages for the same period in 2014.Footnote1 There is no change in the languages featured and little change in the ranking of the languages.
Interestingly, Spanish surpassed Chinese (PRC) as the most used language in the summer of 2014. Between June and August of 2014 Spanish accounted for 14.1% of translations, while Chinese (PRC) accounted for 10.5% of translations. The reasons for this change are unclear currently.
While we can say that the widget has been popular, the extent to which it has driven additional article usage and citations, and submissions to a journal by foreign language speakers is difficult to determine. We can gather some data on the location of users accessing the full text HTML or downloading the PDF of an article. And we can gather the location data for authors submitting manuscripts. But then establishing whether those readers and authors are users of the Google Translate widget and the extent to which the widget factored into their decision to read an article or submit a manuscript is not feasible.
In light of the popularity of the widget, Taylor & Francis is considering other pages that it would be appropriate to embed the Google Translate widget on.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Laird Barrett
Notes
1. All figures taken from Google Analytics and based on sample data.