Google Translate BUTTON producing odd results on some pages

Question

UPDATE: even though I've put a bounty here, the answers provided are not even slightly helpful so save yourself the time and move on... sorry.

My URL is: http://colnect.com/en/forum/viewtopic!f%3D46%26t%3D35678

Click the "Translate" button offered by Google. This used to work just fine. Now it translates some of the blocks and for others shows only > instead of translation or keeping the original. I've attached here an "after" screen captures. If you follow the URL and try it for yourself you'll see more parts were being removed. Perhaps Google changed something in the way the button works or there's some Javascript bug there. Would be happy for any ideas here. Thanks

Note: cross-posted on http://productforums.google.com/forum/#!category-topic/webmasters/internationalization/rykImZlToVk

Answer 1

Not quite sure what this has to do w/ programming (if you're a developer for the site, making a browser plugin, etc.), but if I had to purpose a way that translation is being buggy I'd suggest these things:

1. Check that elements on the website's page are properly identified. No dead links, misroutings, wrongful JavaScript element calls, wrongful CSS element declarations, etc.
2. Check that the Google Translate API is set up correctly. If everything is working fine on Google Translate itself, everything should be fine w/ the core API.

Answer 2

The solution may be found in one of the suggestions on that topic's fourth page, first post:

I support option 1 ("Translate" icon for each individual post). I think it will be very convenient -

1/ Usually you are interested in a translation of only a few posts out of every page at most anyway. There is no need to translate the whole page.

2/ It will be possible to translate different posts in different languages in the same page.

3/ No need to scroll up the page to click "Translate"

4/ Will be able to see original text

What I'm believing is that, due to the nature of your fora, the translator assumes that an individual post is one language and will try to back-translate it to the user's preferred. What happens is actually evident in the (current) translator for the first post.

I would like to inform you that in the box no longer works the translator. Let me know if you too have experienced the inconvenience. thanks

becomes

I would like to Inform You That in the box no longer works the translator. Let me know if you too have experienced the inconvenience. thanks

with an appended ,[lang code] at the end of the post.

By the way, you can see the picture's problem here despite the rest being in English and a post in Spanish. I'm assuming the translator is thinking every post is in Spanish (or whatever language it is) and it decides to spit garbage when it doesn't know how to translate to the preferred language.

As much as I love having multiple languages in a single post or even a forum topic, a machine translation cannot tell the difference between "A" language and "A" language despite being the same and being tagged as (in the example) Italian, Spanish, or what have you. This is an error in Google Translate, known as "recursive translation", and may not be fixed for a while.

So, what I recommend is this:

1. Ask your users to preferably write in one language. This is for the sake of the machine translation so that the poster doesn't confuse it.
2. Add a dedicated translate button to each post. Not only will this speed up times, it will be way more convenient as outlined by the poster, and avoid any errors not tagged with their respective [lang tag].

3. Unless this is not implemented (and I believe it is), it would be best to have your own tagging system so Google Translate will know the difference between "A" and "B" languages. In addition to this, you can also mess around with the site's code so that {some foreign language}[lang code] will be wrapped around the text. For example:

   {Vorrei comunicare che nella casella posta non funziona più il traduttore. Fatemi saper se avete anche voi riscontrato l'inconveniente. Grazie}[it]

   {Paulo}[dnt]