How to Add a Google Translate Button using JavaScript

Google Translate is a powerful tool from Google that allows you to translate a web page into any language.

This allows your pages to be more accessible to people who might not speak your language.

In this post, we'll learn how we can use a small amount of JavaScript to add a Google Translate button to our web pages.

How to add a Google Translate button to your web page

To illustrate this example, let's first start with an example HTML page:

	<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta charset="UTF-8">
        <title>Google Translate Button</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Google Translate Button</h1>
        <p>This is a paragraph of text.</p>
    </body>
</html>

This is a simple HTML page with a heading and a paragraph of text.

To add a Google Translate button, first we must define where it will live on the page by adding a div element with an id attribute of google-translate-element:

	<div id="google-translate-element"></div>

Now, we must import the Google Translate JavaScript library:

	<script type="text/javascript" src="//translate.google.com/translate_a/element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit"></script>

Now, we must define a function that will be called when the Google Translate library is loaded.

We can set the page language to English by adding the pageLanguage option:

	<script type="text/javascript">
    function googleTranslateElementInit() {
        new google.translate.TranslateElement({pageLanguage: "en"}, "google-translate-element");
    }
</script>

Put all of this together to form a single page now:

	<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
    <head>
        <meta charset="UTF-8">
        <title>Google Translate Button</title>
    </head>
    <body>
        <h1>Google Translate Button</h1>
        <p>This is a paragraph of text.</p>

        <div id="google-translate-element"></div>

        <script type="text/javascript">
            function googleTranslateElementInit() {
                new google.translate.TranslateElement({pageLanguage: "en"}, "google-translate-element");
            }
        </script>

        <script type="text/javascript" src="//translate.google.com/translate_a/element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit"></script>
    </body>
</html>

When you load this page in your browser, you should see a Google Translate button appear at the bottom of the page, allow you to translate the page into any language.

Conclusion

In this post, we learned how to add a Google Translate button to our web pages using JavaScript.

Simply add a div element with an id attribute of google-translate-element and then import the Google Translate JavaScript library and define a function that will be called when the library is loaded.

That's all there is to it, thanks for reading!

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