Bianca Prade

Glad to help. Let us know if the traffic holds up over time.

Kontrib is a multi-lingual social bookmarking website that allows users to submit, vote, and comment on stories. The key difference between Kontrib and the many other social bookmarking websites out there is the ability for the content to be automatically translated using statistical machine translation technology from Language Weaver. Kontrib currently supports English, French, and Spanish along with limited support for Arabic (Arabic into English). For the public beta, all submitted content (stories, descriptions, links, comments) are automatically translated by the machine translation servers. We will add in support for translating user messages as well as add in additional languages over time.

Kontrib’s ultimate goal is to foster communications across the Internet by slowly bridging the language barrier. Of course, machine translations has it’s problems (and many of you have already noted that here in this blog posting). Our goal is to try and provide a gist of what the original content provider is saying. It’s not always perfect but over time, we’ll ask users such as yourselves to help us improve the machine translation output.

In the meantime, if you want to translate your blog content or publicize your site to a wider audience of readers, you can feel free to submit postings, stories etc to Kontrib. We’re constantly looking for feedback – whether it’s about the language translations, the site design, or anything at all. For the guys on my team, Kontrib is all about getting content to a wider audience – one step at a time. I hope all of you will find it useful!

It makes me wonder though. How many of you know where your blog traffic comes from? Does the majority come from English speaking countries or non-English speaking countries?

How would you determine which specific languages to have your blog translated into? Which language do you think has the best chance of developing an audience or market for your blog?

And a serious issue that needs to be considered:

How would your blogging and blog writing change if you knew your blog was being translated?

Though I make use of Google to translate my webpages I am always looking for a better way to do this.

Arpit: Translations aren’t literal copies, so they are not considered duplicated. You can host translated versions of your blog like Blog Herlad does with jp.blogherald.com and Wikipedia and others do as subdomains. You don’t need a new site. You can hire anyone do do translations, they don’t have to be in a another country. Or maybe they can. It’s up to you and who you hire. Payment can be done through PayPal, bank transfer, and many other methods.

These are obstacles that are easy to overcome. Finding the right person who can translate what you write well is harder. Blog Herald hired a company. Weblog Tools Collection hired individuals. A company has a reputation to keep. An individual has a reputation to earn.

MArian: When my husband took a refresher on his Spanish, CNN had just released their Spanish version. He would translate the Spanish into English with Babelfish and only refer to it if he couldn’t figure out a word. He came home one day laughing and showed me how the translation had turned “bombas” into gas pumps being dropped on cities., and freezing the funds of an international terrorist translated into the “government froze his bottoms”.

Spanish, Chinese, and Japanese are among the hardest languages to translate. I think that the use of “poetic license”, metaphors, analogies, and dramatic language won’t work with word-by-word translations. It needs to be phrase-by-phrase, and concept-by-concept.

(BTW I don’t think Darren wrote today’s entry!)

>1) Will the translated version be treated as DUPLICATE CONTENT ?

Not if the translated content is properly implemented, e.g. with SEO-friendly URLs like /english/foo/article.html or /chinese/foo/article.html. SEs will NO way figure out it’s duplicate – and anyway, translations are original work of a sort.

>2) Should one get another domain? or add translations to the same blog.
See above, properly implemented, you can switch languages using a dropdown menu and keep everything on the same domain. Joomla has a plugin for this – Joom!fish (www.joomfish.net) which I have found to work nicely so far.

>3) How can I pay someone to translate my blog? Someone who lives in China or Japan.
You could post a request via a translators site like ProZ.com, which is very good – I get a lot of work from there :) Make sure you are prepared to pay a bit more for a good translation – there are a LOT of bad translations out there!

Sorry for the long comment, but it’s my favourite subject :)

Really interesting guest post. A friend of ours in Germany is majoring in Chinese and she speaks fluent German and English. We have thought about having her translate our blogs and websites into German and Chinese and maybe seeing if she was interested in starting a comapny doing translation services. From what she has told us, translating English to Chinese and vice versa wouldn’t be easy to do with software. It will be interesting to see how translation software evolves in the upcoming years.

I can see the value in translating your blog to as many languages as possible. Nice post.

All the best,
George