Ethan Zuckerman has a great post this morning about the challenges faced by bloggers writing in languages other than English, in particular how the major blog ranking sites don't take into account non-English blogs very well.

Ethan quotes Loïc LeMeur's strategies for multilingual bloggers to engage in a worldwide conversation:

- Write only in English, since English has become a lingua franca for the blogosphere, and alienate your local readers.

- Write only in your native language, though comment on blogs in English and other languages, sometimes translating them for your readers. Accept that this means your input into global conversations will be limited.

- Translate every post so that it appears in English and your local language. While this maximizes readership and inclusion in the conversation, it’s an enormous effort.

- Maintain different weblogs in English and your local language. Occasionally translate between the two, but cover some topics in one and others in the other.

Ethan respnds:

While I wish every bilingual blogger had the time, energy and inclination to pursue the third strategy, I find many of the bloggers I’m most interested in follow the fourth strategy, writing on different topics in English and another language. Knowing that this is what Loïc does, I subscribe to both his English and French feeds - while I don’t read French, I don’t read it well enough that I can usually tell if he’s writing about a topic of interest to me, in which case I’ll plug the entry into Babelfish (or, increasingly, into the excellent translation widget built into Tiger…)

This isn’t a worksable strategy for reading my friend Ndesanjo, though - tragically, automated Kiswahili to English translation lags way behind machine translation between romance languages. And since my knowledge of Kiswahili starts and ends at “Jambo!”, I’d have a hard time deciding which posts on Jikomboe to follow… On the other hand, I would hate for Ndesanjo to stop blogging in Kiswahili and focus on his English blog, as I think his primary blog sends two critical messages: that there are Swahili speakers on the web and that people more comfortable writing in Swahili than in English should be able to share their opinions and views in the same ways that English speakers do.

Read the full blog entry here:

http://www.ethanzuckerman.com/blog/?p=152

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Andy Carvin
Program Director
EDC Center for Media & Community
acarvin @ edc . org
http://www.digitaldivide.net
http://www.tsunami-info.org
Blog: http://www.andycarvin.com
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