After some site upgrades this weekend, Cigar Envy is now available in 22 languages.

This site gets a lot of visitors from around the world. Mouse over the small map graphic in the far right column and you will see what I mean.

We have a broad readership in Europe, Asia and the Middle East in addition to North, Central and South America and the Caribbean. The map shows readers over the past six weeks, with dot size representing numbers of people visiting the site from various locations.

We will be switching over from the machine translations currently on the site in the next few weeks thanks to the interest and assistance of volunteers in several countries. I’m working out a special way of thanking them for their generous assistance.

More on that, and details on the new translations, are below the fold.

The previous nine translations are still accessible through the “widget” in the right sidebar. All of those use Google’s translation engine technology.

The new translations are accessed by clicking on a flag icon at the top of each individual article. You won’t see the new translation flags on the main page yet because of a script conflict, but that will be worked out in a few days.

Added to the list of available translation are Castellano (Latin American Spanish), Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Polish, Dutch, Greek, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Turkish, Indonesian, and Filipino (Tagalog). In addition, there are alternate translations for the nine languages in the sidebar using a different translation engine. Readers of those languages may find that the new translations give a better result.

Also, we now have two different versions of Chinese in “Simplified Chinese” characters under the China and Singapore flags — and I have added two additional versions of Chinese in “Traditional Characters” accessed through the flags of Taiwan and Hong Kong. This means that five separate versions of Chinese are available for the site, which should hopefully be of use to our Chinese-speaking visitors.

These are only machine translations at the moment, and are very limited in how good a job they do at “translating.” For the most part, they will only give a general idea of what has been written, and help those who are bilingual or multi-lingual to better understand the English articles.

That will change soon.

Some very kind people from other countries have volunteered to translate some of the articles and reviews here into their own languages, and we will be working on that as soon as the rest of the site upgrades are completed. If you would like to help in translating some of the articles, please email me and let me know and I’ll be happy to work with you.

I’m working out a way to thank those who assist with some freebies and bonuses that should be of interest.

If you read one or more of these languages, please let me know which of the alternate translations is the most useful. If you know of a translation engine that is better at rendering English into your native language than the ones that I am using here (or a translator for a language not listed) please let me know of that as well.

Thank you for your interest in the site. Watch for some new features in the coming week that will make the site even more useful to those who love cigars.