– Accept that your solution will be imperefect! Some will complain, others will love it.
– Don’t work with Babblefish or any other automatic translation tool. They do more damage than good.
- Look who you want your blog to read. Your potential audience will determine which language to chose or whether indeed you’re better off with a bilingual blog.
- Bilingual regions like Quebec are very senstive to language. Create a tandem blog of a French and an English speaker and post alternately in both languages.
- Be open about your qualms. Engage your blog audience in letting you know what they prefer.

My blog about Japan is written in French, Japanese and English. I am still wondering if the mix of comments written in different languages makes sense. What should I do ? I obviously don’t have the time to translate everybody’s comments. Should I try to translate the most interesting one, or translate my answers ? The plugin I am using (polyglot for WordPress) allows to use languages tags in the comments.

What do you think of my ’solution’ ?

How do you blog in more than one language? Variations on the same question arise at……

http://blog.achille.name/2006/08/16/how-to-set-up-and-manage-a-multi-lingual-blog/

Hope it helps.

Cheers,

Sante

Personally I’m not at all interested in automated translations. Anyone who’s even remotely polyglot will tell you how bad the translations usually are. Given the high complexity of natural languages, and the very different ideomatic ways that different languages use to express the similar things, I think it’ll still be a long way until we get decent automatic translations. Add to that the pace at which internet lingo evolves and the situation gets even worst.

With Gengo you chose the languages you will be using, and for every post you can indicate what language it’s in, and wether it’s the translation of another posts. Translations automatically link to each other. Comments stay seperated per language, but there’s also a link to see the comments in other languages. Some posts I write in one language, some in the other, and some in both. Depends on what I think is the potential audience.

I wrote an article on using multilingual sites to increase AdSense revenue and organic SERP’s through increased unique content:
http://www.twofiftyaday.com/2006/07/18/increase-adsense-revenue-by-800-in-just-10-minutes/

Peter

My journal (I don’t call it a blog) is in English and if I have detailed article i’ll break it out onto my main portal (run under Joomal where I have more control about article positioning and formatting.) THis is the site that I run in two languages. Not the journal!

By having a complete seperate lanuage portal i’m able to offer a better revenue-sharing opportunity. The translator is able to translate my reports (which are not time-critical) as they have time. At the moment i’ve only had the first article translated due to the transaltor being ill (there’s another problem to consider.) but they have seen the ‘clicks-light’ and are happy to continue.

For time-critical news information, an auto-translator might be the best option but if you’re including valuable editorial, be very careful.

Steve.

(Plus if you use a program like Movable Type, you have to HTML all the accents and symbols.)

For example, I was a little confused by this sentence:

En la tecnología, como es ley de vida, lo viejo se rinde ante el empuje de lo nuevo. Es por eso que dentro de poco las cabinas telefónicas nos parecerán un objeto tan arcaico como los gramófonos o el NoDo.

So I used a translation program which gave me this translation:

In the technology, as it is life law, the old thing surrenders before the push of the new thing. It is why soon the telephone cabins will seem to us a as archaic object as the gramófonos or the Node.

Okay, I get that. Cabinas telefonicas are obviously telephone booths. I used the translation program as a shortcut, but if I were actually going to make a coherent posting out of the translation, it would obviously require a lot of modification.

I’m not sure why, if they have a truly bilingual site, there isn’t someone who could write an original post, perhaps on the same general topic, or someone who could quickly modify a translation.

I tried the Pet Lvr Blog translation, and it wasn’t too bad (just as google page translations are understandable) but it had typical imperfections. For example, it didn’t know the words “tiresome” and “everytime” so it left them untranslated. This can make it challenging to read the page if you know a different language. I could get the gist of the post by reading it in Spanish, but some parts were unintelligible.

I’m not saying it’s the solution to Darren’s problem. Like I said, however, *my* best solution would be one blog, where you can choose the language of the interface, and as such, the articles posted would be divided into two database entry, one for french, one for english.

I can somewhat figure out where the traffic comes from, but it would be hard anyway to find out the demographics because there are a lot of bilingual people who read my blog, and to them, either language is fine, so that would also place a bias on my stats, even if I had “two” blogs.

Some of my readers however like the fact french and english are next to one another on a single page. To these people, it is a way to improve their french (or english). I can see however that this is not for everyone.

As for my post being to large, well, they would be just as large if I was blogging in one language, but they might be a little less “long”. :)

Thanks for the “critique” and comments. Darren, listen to Eric. ;)

brem

Initially, it was a babelfish-based translation, but I gave up on this soon enough as it was no good in producing good Russian to English translation. It really does take a bilingual blogger to maintain both translations for each article.

Originally the blog I’m talking about (http://solaris.reys.net) was started in Russian. Few months later I had added an English part of the blog (http://solaris.reys.net/english) and everything in the blog engine had been hacked so that practically every link on Russian blog corresponds to the same one in English, like this:
http://solaris.reys.net -> http://solaris.reys.net/english
http://solaris.reys.net/2006/08/solaris_books -> http://solaris.reys.net/english/2006/08/solaris_books

So, it’s easy enough to switch the language for a specific entry (there is a link provided). The only problem I’m still facing is that English-speaking visitors can’t obviously read the comments in Russian, and due to the complexity of the task I’ve decided to leave all the comments in a single thread for each blog entry.

What could be done though is a custom filter which would show English comments to English-speaking readers (based on the default language of your browser), and Russian comments to Russian-speaking ones.