How To Stop “Would You Like To Translate It?” Appearing On Your Website

The experience people have when using your website is important. Crucial, really, to its success.

There are many reasons that a visitor might not enjoy using your website – from something simple such as not being able to find what they were looking for, to becoming frustrated with an overly-complex checkout process.

Language is (obviously) very important. You know this. I know this. Google knows this. Do Google know this? Well, kind of.

An ecommerce website recently had an issue with visitors using Google Chrome being asked “This page is in Italian. Would you like to translate it?”

They were given the three choices of “Nope”, “Translate” or “Never translate Italian”.

The thing is, the page wasn’t written in Italian, it was in English.

The page happened to include a single Italian word, “espresso”, a number of times, which made Google think that the whole page was in Italian, which was:

Potentially confusing for visitors
like many words and phrases in regular English usage, “espresso” has merely been adopted by English speakers.

Potentially annoying for visitors
pop-up bars, including “official” browser pop-ups might be annoying.

Potentially a barrier for conversion
Pop-up bars remove focus from the products and are a distraction from purchasing. “Official” browser pop-ups might be enough to send a visitor running a mile – most of the time in-browser bars appear is with technology warnings, malware, broken SSL certificates and other errors of a more serious nature.

There’s A Quick Fix, But Not An Ideal Solution

Ideally, Google would offer to translate a foreign language into your native language, excluding any foreign words that are in everyday use in your native language (which includes a lot of names of food and recipe ingredients).

Google Translate is not there yet, so there are two paths you can go down:

1. Don’t change anything (and live with the consequences)
2. Stop Google from showing the “Would You Like To Translate It?” message completely

It’s a simple thing to implement – you only need to add a Meta Tag to the page of the website that’s experiencing the problem.

If there is an issue with every page of a website, add the tag to each page – obviously if you’re using a CMS such as WordPress, Drupal or other then you can add the tag to your template.

Here’s the Meta Tag:

I hope that solves your problem, and leads to better experiences for visitors to your website!