Hi,

I work for a company that does online questionnaires. Our questionnaires get translated by Chrome for people who have automatic translation turned on. We specify the language correctly in the html declaration as suggested by the w3.org website.

Problem 1: automatic language detection detects wrongly.What seems to happen is that the transtate mechanism scans the page for anything it thinks is not the specified language. In our case the language is Dutch. Answer categories are: Ja (Yes) / Nee (No). Problem 1 is that the Chrome translates the Dutch 'Ja' into 'En'. Translating it into English would give 'And'. When using Google Translate's option 'recognise language' it thinks that 'Ja' is Finnish. So it translates my Dutch word, on my Dutch page from Finnish to Dutch. Hence the 'en' ('and').

Problem 2: meta tag as suggested by the help pages does not work.So now we want to enforce no more translation on all our pages. http://translate.google.com/support/ suggests using the meta tag: < meta name="google" value="notranslate" >. I have tried all thinkable possible combinations with the declaration of languages and the meta tag. But this does not have any effect. The < span class="notranslate" > does work however.

So for me solving my own problem, I've added class="notranslate" to the body tag: and now my page does not get translated anymore.

Problem 1: Chrome tries to identify the language in each block of text, and completely ignores the language declaration of the webpage.
Problem 2: < meta name="google" value="notranslate" > does not work.
Solving problem 2 (and thus also solving problem 1): body class="notranslate"

I found no other discussion on this subject and I've browsed all 320 open issues in the issue queue on 'translation'. Is there anyone who can tell me why the meta tag does not work and if my solution is a solid one. Or is there something I'm doing wrong? Are these issues bugs I should report to Chrome's queue or Google Translate's queue?

Thanks in advance.
Bart

PS by posting my solution with this post I hope to help others who have Google'd for hours for this same problem.