I understand only English languages and a little bit of Spanish myself. Had it not been for the Google Translate, I would have not been able to enjoy hundreds of websites designed in many different languages. For example, I frequently check the Japanese sites for their awesome content and news stories. But sometimes when trying to translate a webpage using Google Translate, it shows an error – “The page you have attempted to translate is already in English”. This error is shown for two reasons – the webpage you are trying to translate is indeed in English, or the webpage was not correctly configured and Google thinks that it is in English.
In the first case, you cannot really do anything except access that website directly as it is already in English. But in the latter case, you have to manually tell Google Translate about the source language of the webpage so that Google does not have to rely on automatic determination of the language.
There are two ways of doing it. The first method is easier and quicker – when you are trying to translate a webpage into English on the Google Translate site, click on the source language drop-down list box and manually choose the language of that site instead of using “Detect language”. For example, if you know that the source language is Japanese then choose “Japanese” from the drop-down list-box. Leave everything else as it is and it should work fine.
The second method is basically the same, but you have to edit the Google Translate URL for the translation. In the URL you will find sl=auto somewhere. The auto here means automatically detect the source language of the web page. You have change auto to the language code of the language of the webpage. For example, the code of Japanese is ja, so change auto into ja and press Enter to make it translate the source webpage from Japanese to English.
Conclusion: If you are not using Google Chrome, which tends to give a little better language translation results using Google Translate, then you may run into ‘already in English’ translation errors. But by choosing the source language manually, this error can be fixed very easily.
Very useful. Thank you!