How can I use Google Translate on my own (cloud based) Confluence pages?

[Robert Schneider]

I tried to follow the instructions given on https://support.google.com/translate/answer/2534559?hl=de&co=GENIE.Platform=Desktop

(go to translate.google.com, paste the URL on the left side, select language, click on URL on the right side)

But all I get is a message

The page you have attempted to translate is already in English.

But https://toolmaker.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/DOKU/pages/652214281/Allgemeine+Hinweise definetely is in German :-(

I tried a different (non-Confluence) URL, that works fine.

Apparently Google Translate does not look to deeply into a page to determine its language and gives up far too early.

Is there a special trick to use Google Translate for a Confluence page?

[Zak Laughton · Accepted solution]

Hi Robert!

Unfortunately, it looks like Google translate isn't able to see the page at all. If you set the "from" language to "Detect Language" and the "to" language to "English", you'll see the "already in English" error. But if you set the "from" language to "German", the error goes away and google shows its translation of the site, which is just a blank page.

Confluence Cloud is built using React which is a great library that dynamically displays each element of the page. Unfortunately, this can mean tools that don't expect this will initially see a blank page on the very initial load if they do not expect to load a React app. Until Google Translate supports React sites, you probably won't be able to use the translate feature as you described to translate the entire page.

However, there are alternatives:

• Use the built-in translate functionality in Chrome
• Install a Google translate browser plugin
• Do it the old-fashioned way and copy-paste the text from the page into Google translate.

I hope this helps!
– Zak

[Robert Schneider]

Hi Zak,

thank you for your response! Glad to see that I am not too stupid to use this function ;-) Google translations are not that great, after all.

Meanwhile I found another path and I believe that I will try to follow that: The source editor gives you the whole page with all markups, etc. I found that I can copy-paste that into deepl.com and then copy-paste the result into a blank Confluence page (opened in the source editor). That works pretty well, at least upon my first attempt.

It still leaves me with a lot of manual work plus I must make sure to make any later-on changes to all the language-pages, but the translation looks very good. My boss thinks, it's worth it.

Thanks!
-Robert

[Zak Laughton]

Glad you were able to find a usable workaround. Hopefully, Google translate will have better React support soon.

(On a side note: That's cool you can paste URL's into Google translate to translate an entire page. Didn't know about this method!)

[Robert Schneider]

Just a second: I am using deepl.com for the translation. That regularly delivers a much better translation than Google Translate.

And I not only copy-paste the URL, but the entire page's content, which I retrieve with the Source Editor. 

But I guess, GT would be able to translate the the page content, as well - only less precise.