Comments on: The plight of the bilingual blogger…

By: Brent

Brent — Sun, 07 Sep 2008 06:00:38 +0000

Interesting post on the subject. I’m trying to figure out what I want to do, and I’m ending up with something between 3 and 4. I started a foreign language blog as part of a class at school, but now continuing it I have to wonder to what interest it would be to most of my other friends, who would be reading it if it were in English…

By: Bo

Bo — Wed, 15 Feb 2006 03:31:10 +0000

I consulted this post before launching a blog for my organization in English and Japanese. Option 3 works pretty well, actually, if you expect many of your readers to be able to read both languages to some extent, but perhaps prefer one over the other. You can tweak Option 3 and serve up the reader's preferred language, when you've translated your post, or whichever language you wrote an untranslated post in. It simply involves making up your own XML tags --- ‹English› and ‹Japanese›, in my case. What lies inside the tags gets filtered out depending on the language your reader prefers. See here: English Japanese

By: Kevin Ryan

Kevin Ryan — Sat, 10 Sep 2005 12:27:04 +0000

This will be resolved organically, as any sociolinguistic shift has done, throughout history. Observatiuon and commentary is good, but don’t expect any influence on the process. Linguistic change is like a hurricane, lots of wind and rain, not much you can do about it.

Been living abroad for 30 years. Five in Europe, 25 in Asia. I teach linguistics in Tokyo.

By: Global Voices Online » Blog Archive » English Bloggers, Bilingual Bloggers, and Political Bloggers in Tanzanian Blogosphere

Sun, 28 Aug 2005 18:03:57 +0000

[...] Ethan’s post on the plight of the bilingual bloggers has made an interesting reading to bilingual bloggers emerging on Tanzanian blogosphere. Mtafiti is a Tanzanian female student in Texas. She blogs in Kiswahili and Kichagga, the language spoken by the Chagga. Florence who works in the public relations industry in Dar Es Salaam writes in both Kiswahili and English. She writes about different topics ranging from the reconstruction of Kilwa Ruins and urban tourism to Tanzanian musicians who behave wildly on stage. Esther, a schoolteacher in Dar Es Salaam, has set up English/Kiswahili blog, Indigenous Bank. She plans to write about indigenous knowledge and culture. However, she has not started posting on a regular basis. The latest bilingual blogger is Jeff Msangi, a graduate student at the University of York in Canada. Jeff writes about his experience in Canada and socio-political issues in Tanzania and other parts of the world. [...]

By: Loic

Loic — Sat, 27 Aug 2005 13:29:04 +0000

Hi Ethan and all, agreed on the language divide being much more interesting than my ego issue ;-)

Anyway, my option 3 was actually the option 5 of this comment thread unlike in your post but I understand you were in a plane.

I don’t like this option much because I imagine an American reader of my blog getting 70% of the posts in his agregator in French… He would not like that much I guess.

Still an open issue for me.

By: Boris

Boris — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 01:27:36 +0000

Hrm.. Evidently reading weblogs at 4:30am is detrimental to proper contextual comprehension… ;)

By: Mina

Mina — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 19:28:53 +0000

|||||Very interesting blog …I just started mine on http://www.livejournal.com and my user id is misshindufrench
I found your through congogirl’s journal…By the way |I was unable to get on the Africa blog ????

By: Jeff Msangi

Jeff Msangi — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 19:28:03 +0000

Ethan,
One very interesting analysis about blogging and languages.I am a good example of recent bloggers who carries the burden,risks and challenges of using more than one language in one blog.Looking at the options that you mention I would definetely love to go with the third option of translating every post in all two or more languages that one uses.We all know how practically hard that is.Maintaining two blog each with independent language is quite fair and it would mean justice for all.The challenge of time and consistency would mean bias to one blog over another.The same challenge faces bloggers like me who tries to use two in one policy. If all things were possible I would love to see blogs that are interpreted in at least all major languages.Of course this is a mere wish but only that could bring justice and very true global freedom of expression.Why shouldn’t I be able to understand what French,Spanish,Hindu etc are writting about?Good thoughtful piece.Thank you for writting.

By: Claude Almansi

Claude Almansi — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 14:22:41 +0000

There is an option 5, which is to post in both languages on one blog. (Adam Shostack, 3) I agree. I try to post in 3 languages in one blog, but often posts are only in one language, because it takes time to translate. I ended up making a post called Automated translation: Babelfish 101. But Babelfish only covers a few languages. Fighting the knowledge and information divide in the digital age should go through the development of translating programs for minority languages. Where it only to enable speakers of these languages to translate keywords and a very brief summary of their posts. But as with rare disease, the market is all too often considered as not big enough for R & D of tools for linguistic minorities. However, in Switzerland, the announcement that a team was working on a free software spell checker for Romansh (less than 25'000 native speakers), Microsoft hastened to offer a Romansh version of Windows... best Claude

By: Adam Shostack

Adam Shostack — Thu, 25 Aug 2005 13:55:09 +0000

There is an option 5, which is to post in both languages on one blog. Some Quebecois bloggers do this, as does at least one Swedish blogger who I read. (Johan Norberg )