June 13, 2005

Four options to blog multilingual... or remain local

Posted at 23:29 in Blogging about blogging, Europe | | 15 Comments

I am confused by a discussion that happened on my French blog today, when you live in a Country like mine where english is not the natural language, you have four ways of approaching the problem:

1. blog only in english, then you're not close to your local audience, or blog only in local (French for me) and you can't create a global conversation

2. mix english posts and french posts, like Martinepage this of course is a problem for those who only read English (or French) because they are disturbed by other posts they cannot read

3. translate every single post in both languages, like Emmanuelle is doing, probably the best solution but that is very difficult for the author because he has to translate every single post and that takes a long time. Also, it prevents the author in a way to talk only about local topics as even though they would be translated, they would probably not be interesting to a global audience. I should say I am tempted by this option

4. two blogs, one in English, one in French, the option I chose. This option has some drawbacks too, the blogs are less powerful in search engines because split in two. For example the Technorati links are spread in two and do not add-up here is what happens for me:
-my French blog has 1219 links from 750 sources
-my English blog has 468 links from 320 sources

the result should be 2906 links from ? sources where the entire domain shows 2195 links from 1213 sources. This shows that the numbers do not add up easily and that there are many people not linking to the blogs but directly to the domain...

When you look at the ranking of the European blogosphere we did with 50 bloggers, it clearly shows the demand for local Country rankings and a global European one. But Europe is a mix of languages and cultures, and also of ways of blogging (people like Heiko are Germans but only blog in English, while others only blog in their language...)

So what should be the right way of blogging multilingual according to you ?
What should be the right way to show rankings of these blogs using Technorati ? Thanks for your help...

I chose no. 2 because sometimes I just feel like writing in english and sometimes it would just be wrong if it wasn't in english (or slovene for that matter). Some of the things I write about are purely local and would be of no interest to anyone on the outside. I make those decisions as I go but they come naturaly. I don't really give it much thought.

Doing two blogs on the same issues at the same time or translating everything would be just too much work and probably wouldn't make any sense most of the time.

I don't think it's terribly confusing for someone not familiar with local language (slovene in my case) and I'm absolutely certain locals don't have problems with english. You can just ignore it, presume it's irrelevant.
As long as one language doesn't dominate everyone should be happy.

Jernej, June 14, 2005 at 00:32

I decided to mix English and German post. Even so most people in my country understand English, some feel that, if I write about something related to Germany, I should write in German.

For me there are not enough reasons (and to much work) to publish two separate blogs. My only wish still open, a simple button ((translate)) from my provider, right next to any post.

Hugo E. Martin, June 14, 2005 at 06:47

Funny you should mention it... I've just started a bilingual (French + English) blog, and I've been experimenting with two of the four options you've identified.

I assume non-francophones will just ignore the French posts, and that non-anglophones will ignore the English posts. Much like Hugo, I feel that if I'm blogging about current events in Quebec, I should blog in French. But if my experience with online translation tools is any indication, the results are always more funny than they are exact.

Nicolas, June 14, 2005 at 17:50

I write mainly in german, as this is my target audience. Thus, I use my english to point out interesting things in the english-spoken blogsphere.

From time to time I write in english, when I describe more global projects of mine like bloggeria.com and taggling.com.

Dirk Olbertz, June 16, 2005 at 08:02

Option no. 2, mixing German and English postings... that´s the way I do in my blog.

regards, kho

kho, June 16, 2005 at 12:51

The problem with making decisions about language is that you don't relly know what might be of interest to people who read in another language. Especially true in Europe. I read in English and French but my written French is rubbish.

Dennis Howlett, June 16, 2005 at 15:48

An excellent question. I chose option 4, since the blogs also follow different purposes. However, the PR-blog could attract more readers if I'd also write in German...

sebastian Keil, June 16, 2005 at 20:47

I've been facing this problem for the past 3-4 years. I've startet several blogs in both danish and english, and the only one surviving its first 100 (1000 actually) posts is my english language blog "Langemarks Cafe". Every time I come home from a blogger conf. I start a new danish language blog because people say I should. They don't live for long. I don't know why. Maybe because my english language blog is more of the professional kind, and the danish ones have been more personal. As I tend to protect my family from being the content of my posts, I don't really have a lot of personal stuff to write.
:-)

Gunnar Langemark, June 17, 2005 at 08:22

I've decided to do a bilingual blog because it reflects the way I live and think. I speak English at home because I live with an English Canadian man and a lot of my freelance work (screenwriting) is also done in English. Yet I live in a very francophone environment and French is my first language so I couldn't imagine not writing in French at all.

I was tempted at a time to write mostly in English but I want to promote diversity on the Web so I decided to do my part and write in another language than English. I know I lose readers because of this switching between the two languages but it's not something that worries me very much. I'm hoping that online translation tools will get so good that this will all eventually become pointless.

I rarely decide conciously what language I'm going to write a post in. When I have a subject in mind for a post, the first sentence usually comes to me and if that sentence is in French, than I write the post in French, if it's in English, I write it in English. I write for a living so it's nice to have more freedom and fun with my writing on the Web!

Martine, June 21, 2005 at 04:40

Let's see it in termes of "reader's delight"... (a customer oriented reply).
If you choose to keep up to a bilingual blog -provided that you can spare the time to translate every item- it would be a good idea to offer a new smaller browser with button(or flash veil), that the reader might read you in English. Now, just think how inconvenient it would be for readers if your text is more than 15 or 20 lines long.. which would make it up to 40 lines long including translation before access to replies. Interruption risked, loss of instantaneity, loss of replies... so much for the basic idea of blogging!!
Unless you are ready to watch your inspiration and dedicate to short cuts.

Your question leads to that of ergonomy offered by blogware. But tell me the truth : did not it occurred to you ?

flo, June 23, 2005 at 00:02

Another thought that occurred to me is quality of translation, which might every now and then not keep close to native standards. We all have to face it, in every sense of the word.

flo, June 23, 2005 at 00:07

I've just started out with my blog, and for me it was a no-brainer to write in English, even though my first language is Dutch. I write about Google, del.icio.us, the web, etc., and haven't really written a "personal" post yet. I don't feel like commenting on local events either. So why bother writing in Dutch? Ou même bloguer en français, parce que je dois bien améliorer ma connaisance de la plus belle langue :) I could, but then I'd alienate most of my (still rather non-existent) audience.

Hans Van Deun, June 23, 2005 at 19:07

thank you all for your comments. I thought about it and I guess I will just remain the same, two blogs one in english and one in french...

loic, June 23, 2005 at 20:07

Loic, haven't you thought about doing a mix of two blogs so that you have one frontpage for one language, another for the second one and third for posts from both blogs? Make it userconfigurable and keep the information with a cookie or something... I'm just trying to figure the same thing out myself, right now went with having 2 blogs but I'd really like to investigate mixing them together but keeping backends apart.

Teller, July 23, 2005 at 00:57

Is the definition of multilingual website helpful to this topic http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilingual_Website ?

barry, September 03, 2006 at 22:20

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