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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