I have a website with Dutch text which I want to translate to English. Is there a fast way of doing this with keeping the HTML tags(<strong>,<span>) in tact. I know I can just copy the parsed TEXT into a translator but this will remove the formatting.
I also know that at the end I have to go trough the text manually to fix some minor spelling and grammar.
Is a virtual traslate a good option for you? Because if you paste google translato script into your page source, it will translate your text on the site, and the formating will stay there too. http://translate.google.com/translate_tools
If you want to preserve the HTML formatting at the same time as translating, you will have to work directly with the HTML source and update the text yourself without touching the formatting.
You may be able to use an XML editor like XmlSpy that will let you edit text nodes directly without touching the tagging, but this requires that the HTML is actually XHTML. You may still need to translate some attributes (such as title and alt attributes).
Online translators are good to turn foreign text into something that can be understood, but they are useless for producing quality translations. Even if you fix obvious problems at the end, you will get an amateurish word-by-word translation. If you want your visitors to take you seriously, you should translate from scratch.