A few days ago I released a new version of the Translate This Button, a free JavaScript translation widget. Of the sites I tested, the translation operation now runs an average of 70% faster. This performance increase adds to several layers of speed improvements made in previous versions.

Additionally, this release includes other enhancements, such as a reduction in HTTP requests and the preservation of DOM-based JavaScript events. Let’s walk through the changes I made; hopefully some of the optimization techniques can be reused in other projects.

Reducing Calls To The Language API

When a translation occurs, the TranslateThis Button parses the DOM, and passes the data to the Google Language API. Google’s JavaScript API imposes a limit of 500 characters per call, so previously the widget chunked out portions of the DOM that were under this limit, then passed them to Google asynchronously.

Although fairly … Read more…