Breaking the Language Barrier on Websites! Discover the charm of "My Site Translation Premium

With the increasing number of foreign visitors to Japan, multilingualization of websites is becoming an essential tool for attracting foreign tourists.
At Kodensha, I am in charge of development and technology for "My Site Translation," an automatic website translation service.
In this blog, I would like to introduce the higher version "My Site Translation Premium," which was press-released in the summer of 2018, with some development secrets.

What are "My Site Translation" and "My Site Translation Premium"?

This service allows customers to make their website multilingual simply by placing a translation button on their website.
Once the translation is started, all lower-level pages are automatically translated into up to 32 languages.
This is an overview of the existing "My Site Translation" service.
In comparison, "My Site Translation Premium" is,

The above three services can now be supported.

(1) Support for sites that require login authentication

Sites that require login authentication refer to sites that allow users to authenticate their login by entering their ID and password to use the service.
Also, when you shop online,

You may have experienced shopping in the following way when you shop on the Internet.
My Site Translation Premium" supports such e-commerce sites and reservation sites for accommodations, etc.

(2) Display multilingual pages while maintaining the original URL (URL of the Japanese site)

The previous version of "My Site Translation" had a phenomenon where the original URL was changed when translating, but with Premium, the original URL remains the same and the multilingual page can be displayed.
(e.g., https://shop-kodensha.jp/noURL noURLnomama)
This has the advantage of eliminating the anxiety of visitors who may see the URL displayed after translation and think that they have been redirected to a different site or page than the one they were trying to view. This has the advantage of eliminating the viewer's fear that he/she has jumped to a different site or page.

(3) No need to place link tags to execute translation

Since a pull-down menu for language selection is automatically displayed by simply adding a line of script, there is no need to place a link tag to execute the translation, reducing the burden on the site administrator.
It is also possible to place a uniquely designed translation start button or link.
The pull-down menu can be turned on or off, and the display position can be changed.

Finally, a request that has been in the works for several years has been realized!

Sales representatives have been asking for this "My Site Translation Premium" for several years.
The previous "My Site Translation" did not support sites that required login authentication, e-commerce sites, reservation sites, etc., so we often had customers who were interested in "My Site Translation" but did not end up adopting it.
We had already decided to develop a premium version, but we knew it would take a long time, so we looked for a timing that would allow us to secure man-hours for development, and we decided "Now! And that's when we started development.

All the features of MySiteTranslate have been retained...

Here, I would like to look back on some of the difficulties we faced during the development process.
The first challenge we faced was to ensure that the functions available in the existing "My Site Translation" would also be available in the "Premium" version.
Although "My Site Translation Premium" is not upwardly compatible with the existing "My Site Translation," we still wanted to avoid the "I could do it before, but not with the new one" situation. We worked daily on the development of "My Site Translation Premium" based on the premise that "equivalent functionality" was the minimum that had to be met.
However, "MySite Translation Premium" is not simply an improvement of the existing system, but a completely different system, so it was quite a challenge.
This was also true of the dictionary substitution. Every time we found a function that could not be reproduced, we repeated the process of modification and re-testing many times.

Unexpected situations also occurred during the development process.
Just as we were nearing the end of the development of "My Site Translation Premium," we found out that a new version of "My Site Translation" would be released, and we were forced to redevelop the software to support the new version.
In addition, the "Online User Dictionary," a feature of "My Site Translation," was not working in the way it had in the past for some languages.
There were some twists and turns to deal with this phenomenon, but we regret that we cannot give you the details because it is an outside secret.
We are still working daily to make further improvements.
In the previous "My Site Translation," there were some operational problems such as broken links and JavaScript not working, which will be resolved in Premium.
We feel that we are steadily making improvements, step by step, despite the difficulties.

Advantages of "My Site Translation Premium

After reading this blog up to this point, some of you may be thinking, "After all, what is the appeal of MySite Translation Premium?" You may be thinking, "After all, what is the appeal of MySite Translation Premium?
It enables multilingualization of e-commerce sites and reservation sites!
We would be happy if you remember that "Premium can also multilingualize e-commerce sites and reservation sites.

We can make EC sites multilingual, so we recommend this service to companies that want to operate online stores for overseas customers.
In addition, by making reservation sites (reservation forms for accommodations, restaurants, kimono experience, ninja experience, and other experience-based leisure activities) that are expected to be used by foreign visitors to Japan multilingual, customers will be able to make reservations more easily and with peace of mind. We hope that this will be useful in attracting foreign customers.

For your reference, we would like to share with you the languages that have recently become popular.
In addition to English, Chinese (simplified and traditional), and Korean, which we call the four basic languages, Spanish and Portuguese are also popular among European languages.
In addition, requests for Russian, Vietnamese, Thai, and Tagalog have been increasing recently. My Site Translation Premium" supports up to 32 languages, so it is a great advantage to be able to handle a variety of languages from different countries.

There are a huge number of websites in the world, and they vary widely.
However, they all want the same thing: to have as many visitors as possible browse their sites and become interested in them. And this is no longer limited to Japanese-language sites.
We will continue to develop services with higher usability so that our services can be useful for both site operators and visitors.