Wovn.io

Now I live in a non-english speaking country, not only am I far more understanding of non-english speakers in English speaking countries, but I am also more conscious of providing content in multiple languages. The first point is something I would like to revisit in a future post, but for now lets look at a new option for providing content in different languages.

I met the team from wovn.io at TechCrunch Disrupt and whilst I know it’s by far not the only option for proving translations, I am always keen to give new things a whirl and here we are.

Wovn.io aims to be incredibly easy to use, so easy to use, that is has very little documentation, all you need to do is add a small line of code into the head section of your website.

I thought I would try Wovn out with our new Lean Traveller website, so pasted the code in to see what happened.

Almost instantly the pages of the website appeared in the control panel. From here you can then opt to ‘machine translate’ or ‘pro translate’ the page. The professional option gives you a quote for using a ‘professional’ translator, but it’s hard to know what the quality will be. I opted for the machine translation version, which entails selecting your language and clicking the button.

Now, if you refresh the web page, you will see the below:

And here is my page in German:

Is the translation any good?

My German isn’t quite good enough to completely tell, but I tried running it through a few other translation engines and the results aren’t too bad. Of course a human is always better and the fact that you can opt into either is a good idea.

What’s missing?

The main features that are missing for me, is the lack of SEO, i.e. You can’t create new pages on your site from the translation. This is perfectly understandable, how could wovn create pages on your website. In my opinion, due to its ‘on the fly’, dynamic nature, wovn is aimed more at one page and simple sites, such as startups and portfolio sites. We are using Drupal for our sites and it has its own functionality for translation which is more suited to creating site maps and growing, structured sites.

If you are looking for something quick and easy for your site, with the options of providing better translations at a later date then wovn is a great option and I look forward to seeing what is added in the future.