Google's John Mueller said on Twitter that if you automatically translate your content from one language to another, using automated translation services, it likely will not lead to a Google penalty or manual action. He did add that the content might not come out great after you translate it and thus not rank well.
John said "I don't think that would trigger manual actions, but if the translations are bad, then it's bad content in general." He did add "However, machine translation is much much better than it used to be." But it is important to have someone who knows the language review it, so he said "Another option: noindex until reviewed by local users / speakers."
Here are the tweets:
We may take manual action, in particular if it ends up as low-quality machine-generated gibberish'y content. A lot of times, we just rank it the way we'd rank similar content, which ends up working reasonably well (at least, I don't hear a lot of complaints :-)). Why do you ask?
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 22, 2019
I don't think that would trigger manual actions, but if the translations are bad, then it's bad content in general :). However, machine translation is much much better than it used to be. Another option: noindex until reviewed by local users / speakers.
— 🍌 John 🍌 (@JohnMu) October 22, 2019
John previously said that one day Google will have to re-write that guideline as machine written content gets better. But historically, Google Translate or other automated translation services can lead to low quality content and even spam according to Google.
Forum discussion at Twitter.
