Knowing where and how to buy Spanish poker articles is one of my poker webmaster skills that has served me well. It’s not that I speak Spanish, and I don’t read it or write it either. But I live in Texas, where we have a large Spanish-speaking population. So finding someone who can write about poker in Spanish might be a little easier for me than it is for other people.

I’ll tackle the “how to buy Spanish poker articles” question first. This works for me; it might not work for you. I don’t hire Spanish writers to write original poker articles for me, and I have a simple reason for this: I wouldn’t be able to read the articles to tell whether or not they’re any good. Instead, what I do is hire English writers to write original poker articles for me, and then I have them translated into Spanish.

One of my best friends is from Peru, and his Spanish is excellent. So he’s able to help me determine whether or not the translations I receive are any good. Spanish poker translations can be tricky though, because different languages have various nuances. For example, a friend of mine, a poker webmaster of some repute, told me that he once got some translations where “blinds” had been translated into the foreign language equivalent of what you hang on your windows in order to keep light out.

So, “where to buy Spanish poker articles”? I’m assuming, with my technique, that I have someone who can writer English poker articles. If I were broke, I’d write them myself, but I’m not, so I hire writers. I also hire translators. Luckily, I live in Texas, and I’m able to network with Spanish-speaking people pretty easily. I’ve been able to find very affordable translators as a result. Professional translation services are probably worth the money, but I’m the type of businessperson who will do the little bit of extra work involved to find a better deal for my translations. If I can buy someone lunch and wind up getting Spanish poker article translations for half the price of a professional firm for the next year, then that was money well-spent.

Not everyone is in such a fortuitous position as I am though. Like I mentioned, I have a good friend who speaks, writes, and reads fluent Spanish. So he’s able to review the translations for quality for me. If you’re not in such a position, then it’s a little tougher to go the affordable route. You get what you pay for with translations, just like you do with articles. Remember that time you ordered 10 poker articles for $5 each and they all sucked? Guess how good those dirt low price translations are going to be.

I don’t recommend using automated translation services at all. They just churn out gibberish for the most part. But if you’re really strapped for cash, and you’re really interested in doing automated translations, here’s a suggestion. (I’m pretty sure I got this technique from Michael Martinez.) Step by step:

1. Rewrite your poker article in simple English. “Simple English” is intended to be read by people who don’t speak English as their first language. It uses shorter sentences and easier words. (I try to write in simple English most of the time anyway, but I probably fail.)
2. Use an automated translation tool to translate your first “simple English” sentence into Spanish. I like to do this a sentence at a time. This is time-consuming, but it results in more or less readable Spanish sentences.
3. Take that Spanish translation and translate it back into English using that automated translation tool. If it reads the same as your original sentence, then the translation is probably pretty good. If not, try to rewrite the original sentence in simpler English again.
4. Remember that this technique still isn’t as good as getting a real bilingual person to do the translations for you. But it might or might not be better than having no Spanish language pages at all. That’s up to you. (This technique would probably work for any language, btw.)

Be sure when you publish your Spanish language pages that you correct the html in your head section on the web page to reflect that the page is written in Spanish.

Also, before I sign off today, I wanted to give a quick shout out to this new poker strategy site. The creator of the site contacted me to let me know that a lot of the design principles and SEO strategies he used when building the site were inspired by what he’d read here at my blog. I’m honored to have had anything to do with the creation of such an excellent site – I love it! Here are some of the things I like about the site:

1. It doesn’t look like any other poker site I’ve ever seen. Those tired old Wordpress templates just don’t do it for me, so thanks for not making me have to look at that again.
2. The site isn’t full of flashing banners or images. Most sites WAY over-use banners and images. This site is almost entirely about the text.
3. The “about us” page is easy to find. I hate anonymous poker sites. I think users do too. (Everyone’s interested in who’s behind the scenes on a particular site.)
4. The site is linking out generously. I’m certain that most of the links aren’t there because they were paid for, or traded for, or whatever. They’re just there to be a resource for the user. I don’t know why, but it’s almost always easy to discern intent when look at a site’s outlinks.

Anyway, kudos to Steve for an awesome site. I enjoyed everything about it, including the article about successful Texas holdem. I hope the site is a big success for you.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 12th, 2009 at 7:33 am and is filed under Poker Content . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.