Two weekly newspaper websites are hoping to appeal to a wider audience after launching new functionality enabling them to be read in 52 languages.

Staff at the Cambs Times and Wisbech Standard believe theirs could be the first local news sites in the country to offer a translation facility.

The Google-powered tool was added to the Archant Herts and Cambs titles’ websites to cater for the growing migrant workers in the Fenland area both titles serve.

The foreign languages available include Afrikaans, Catalan, Hebrew, Lithuanian and Welsh.

Reporter Tom Jackson said: “We think we could be the first local news website in the country to offer a translation feature and it came from us talking about new initiatives.

“Our editorial assistant said about doing half a page every week in Russian but I then wondered why we hadn’t got a translation facility on our websites.

“We have a large migrant worker population in our catchment but we were not providing a service for them.

“I looked on the Google Translate page and discovered it offers a free translation tool that we can embed on our website.”

All users have to do is visit the home page and select their language using the translation tool after which the website will automatically refresh and display in that language.

Comments

Harry (04/02/2010 09:10:53)
Did anyone actually tried to read this machine translation crap? Wouldn’t it be better to pay a few pounds and translate the main news with services such as http://www.tomedes.com

Sarah Booker (04/02/2010 11:14:50)
I started adding Google Translate links to every news, sport, feature etc. web story on the Worthing Herald series sites more than a year ago.