One problem with machine translation is that machines don’t know when to stop translating. For example Yahoo’s Babel Fish translator translates my last name “Cook” literally to “Cocinero” in Spanish and “Cuisinier” in French.
Today Google announced a way to tell its translator that text should not be translated. Place such text inside a
<span> tag with the attribute
class="notranslate". I tried this on a web page that explained that a certain piece of code printed out “Hello world.” Since “Hello world” is literal output, it should be left untranslated, not turned into, for example, “Bonjour le monde.” The solution was to modify the HTML to say
The code above prints “<span class="notranslate">Hello world</span>.”
To prevent an entire page from being translated, add the following tag in the
<head> section of the page.
<meta name="google" value="notranslate">
I suppose other machine translation efforts, such as those from Microsoft and Yahoo, will follow Google’s lead and support the