Loveletters

Well, it helps if your lap top power cable actually plugs into the sockets the country you want to plug them into uses. Then I could have bloggeged this immeadiately. I learned for next time.

The second talk I sat in was by Stephanie Booth on Multilingual blogging, which as you might have guessed is something that I find very interesting.
She started out by describing the internet as the “big crunch”^[1], where space suddenly didn’t seem to matter much anymore. But even in the internet there are sill spaces, in the bloggosphere these spaces are built along a common culture and, mor importantly, along a common language. Well, in the real world you can go fly to Lisabon and learn something about Portugese culture, b ut what would te equivalent be in the internet? This is where we need multilanguage blogs, as bridges between the different blogging communities. So for example, if there is this huge “scandal” in the anglophone blogging world, then a multilanguage blogger with a multi- and monolingual audience can transfer these dicsussions into her own community if she thinks it important. There are a bunch of strrategies possible to achieve this:

1)two seperate blogs
2)total translation
3)machine translation
4)sometimes one sometimes the other with short summaries and links to similar blog posts
5)translation network

I have thought about most of these before and they each have their problems. #one has the problem, that not all comments are accessible to all readers, a language x user might not want to slog through a language y article, but maybe through the comments. Also you would have different adress strings for the same content, which makes it harder on people linking and on your stats. #two I’ve tried, I would say, unsuccessfully. It is really just a lot of work. And the way I have it now, with the link at the top and then both texts underneath eachother, just makes for awfully confusing and long entries. Also blogging is such a short spontaneious activity that translating is just a little burdensome. #three, yeah we can dream! Goggle translation is really awful for now. #four is one I’ve looked at, but i see myself always writing in english, because I would asume that my german readers know some english, whereas my english readers know no german. Correct me if I’m wrong. This does give the german readers that aren’t so fit in english the possibility to select the posts they want to read and those they don’t, those that are worth the effort and those that aren’t. #five I would love, you get a database with articles other people want to have translated, add your own and translate someone elses. Most people find translation into their mother tounge easier so I could offer to translate from english to german. But really most bloggers prefer to write their own texts anyway. So really no clear solutions here.

But I did go away with the feeling, that writing in two languages is something that is desirable.

Well, then it was time for lunch and I went with Diana, who thankfully helped me out with swiss francs^[2], Maira and Mark.

Mark programmed a nice little multilanguage blogging implementation called Multilingva, which can do all the multilingual things I would like to have, but doesn’t have the extensive commuity things like wordpress have. Maybe that will change in the future.

After those three sessions I was a bit sessioned out and my cold was really starting to bother me, so we just hung aroud a little and talked. I don’t see Diana so very often as I would like, so its good to have some time to talk.

The next BlogCamp will be held around Okober 20th if anyoe is interested in coming, I will probably be there.

1. opposed to the big bang [↩]
2. I’m telling you, I was really unprepared [↩]

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