When you translate a website from one language to another using Google Translate, the URL is something like google.com/translate?langpair=en|ar where en|ko is the language pair indicated the site will be converted from English to Arabic.
Now if you make both the languages in the pair same (i.e., en|en for English to English), the translation is effectively skipped but the requested web content is still served from Google servers. Thus, lot of people use Google Translate as a proxy server to access blocked websites.
However, the honeymoon is almost over because Google has stopped accepting website translation requests that have the same language on both sides of the pair (en|en, it|it, etc). Google uses their own language translation software and they have probably done this to prevent misuse of their translation service.
The only consoling part is that this “free proxy” trick still works perfect with other translation tools like Yahoo! and AltaVista Babelfish that are powered by Systran. See a real example that uses Babel Fish - look at the URL in your address bar.
Related: Add Google Language Translation Flags to your Website
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/tools/google-free-proxy-server-language-translation-service/2175/
web: http://www.labnol.org/ email: amit@labnol.org
Reader Comments
You can get pages designed for mobile devices with this URL:
link
That would show up in the visited site logs as…
216.239.50.136 - - [29/Jan/2008:14:50:50 +0000] “GET / HTTP/1.0″ 200 30 “-” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Google Wireless Transcoder;)”
Written by Kris on 01.29.08
don’t tell me you gave up that easy :-)
try translating an already english web page from itallian to english … :-)
Written by mage ringlerun on 01.29.08
Normally I will just use non-English pair with English (e.g. de|en) for the proxy (to test stuff) and that works (almost) perfectly.
[link to link ]
Written by Haochi on 01.29.08
I could not download the free proxy server. would you kindly send it to me at my mentioned email ?
THAN YOU
Written by M.A salih on 06.09.08
I just opened link via google translation service, it showed my actual ip (and not the google’s proxy servers ip). Ideally a proxy server should hide your IP while letting you browse the desired website.
Click the below given URL to see for yourself:
link
Always check if your IP address is properly protected (i.e. hidden) by a proxy server you plan to use before actually starting to use it.
Written by Mike on 01.10.09