How to Create a Google Translate Widget in 2025 (Step-by-Step Guide)
Make Your Website Multilingual in 5 Minutes
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How to Create a Google Translate Widget (and What You Need to Know in 2025)
Introduction
Once upon a time, making your website multilingual felt almost magical. With a single line of Google’s code, anyone could offer their content in more than a hundred languages. From bloggers to small business owners, the Google Translate widget became a faithful companion, helping websites connect with visitors far beyond their borders.
But that era has passed. The simple widget disappeared, leaving many site owners asking: “Can I still create a Google Translate widget? And if I can, should I?”
This is the story of the widget’s rise, fall, and what it really means to bring it back today.
The Rise and Fall of the Google Translate Widget
Back in the early 2010s, you could visit almost any corner of the web and spot the Google Translate dropdown. It lived in sidebars, headers, or footers—quietly waiting for a visitor from another country to click it. With that single click, entire websites transformed. It wasn’t perfect—sentences sometimes came out awkward—but it was free, instant, and good enough.
Then, in December 2019, the familiar little box began to vanish. Google quietly pulled the plug. No big announcement, no loud campaign—just a notice that the widget was no longer available for general use. For site owners who had built their multilingual presence on it, the disappearance was like losing an old friend.
A brief reprieve came in 2020, when the world needed translations more than ever. During the height of the pandemic, Google released a stripped-down version for hospitals, government agencies, and nonprofits. But this was only a temporary measure. The golden days of the free widget never returned.
Today, when people talk about adding a “Google Translate widget,” they aren’t referring to that old box. They mean either:
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A custom-built widget powered by the Google Cloud Translation API, or
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A third-party service, like ConveyThis, that brings back the ease of a widget but adds modern SEO and editing tools.
Why People Still Miss It
The old widget had charm. It was simple, reliable, and it gave a sense of global openness. For small sites, it was a doorway to the world. And that feeling—of being instantly understood anywhere—is hard to replace.
But as beloved as it was, it also had cracks. The translations could be clumsy. Businesses had no control over mistakes. And the translated text wasn’t something search engines could index, so while visitors could read in their own language, Google Search couldn’t.
Building a Widget Today
Even though the original is gone, the spirit of it can live on. If you are willing to roll up your sleeves, you can build your own Google Translate widget using the Cloud Translation API. The steps are straightforward:
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Get your API key from Google Cloud.
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Add the script to your site.
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Create a small container for the widget.
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Initialize it with JavaScript, setting your site’s main language and the options you want.
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Test it across devices and browsers.
Here’s what that looks like in practice:
<!DOCTYPE html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="UTF-8">
<title>Google Translate Widget Demo</title>
<style>
#google_translate_element {
position: fixed;
top: 10px;
right: 10px;
padding: 6px;
background: #fff;
border: 1px solid #ddd;
border-radius: 6px;
box-shadow: 0 2px 4px rgba(0,0,0,0.1);
}
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>Welcome to My Multilingual Site</h1>
<p>This page will be translated dynamically using Google Translate.</p>
<div id="google_translate_element"></div>
<script type="text/javascript">
function googleTranslateElementInit() {
new google.translate.TranslateElement({
pageLanguage: 'en',
includedLanguages: 'es,fr,de,zh-CN,ar',
layout: google.translate.TranslateElement.InlineLayout.SIMPLE
}, 'google_translate_element');
}
</script>
<script src="https://translate.google.com/translate_a/element.js?cb=googleTranslateElementInit"></script>
</body>
</html>
This little snippet is the modern descendant of that once-famous widget. It floats politely in the corner, waiting for someone to click and discover your content in their own language.
The Limits You Need to Know
But there’s a catch. The translated text your visitors see isn’t something Google Search can read. To search engines, your site is still in one language. That means no extra traffic from international search queries, no ranking for keywords in French, Spanish, or Arabic.
For businesses, that’s a dealbreaker. It means that while your content may look accessible, it isn’t truly discoverable.
Beyond the Widget: What Comes Next
This is why many site owners eventually move beyond the Google Translate widget. They start with it, because it’s simple and nostalgic, but soon realize they need more. They need control over translations, better user experience, and—above all—visibility in global search.
That’s where tools like ConveyThis come in. They combine the speed of machine translation with the polish of human editing, create proper language-specific URLs, and handle all the behind-the-scenes SEO. In other words, they pick up where Google’s widget left off.
Summarize this post with:
Ready to Get Started?
Translation, far more than just knowing languages, is a complex process.
By following our tips and using ConveyThis , your translated pages will resonate with your audience, feeling native to the target language.
While it demands effort, the result is rewarding. If you’re translating a website, ConveyThis can save you hours with automated machine translation.
Try ConveyThis free for 3 days!
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