Darren Barefoot has an interesting question that I’ve been hearing a number of bloggers asking recently. It centers around bilingual blogs. He’s working with a company that has a bilingual site (English and French I suppose as it’s Canadian). Darren writes:
“They want to launch a blog, but it’s something of a pilot project and they don’t have the resources to launch it in both languages. There’s not only the cost and pain of translating the entries, but the dodgier issue of translating (or not translating) user-generated comments as well.
How should they deal with this issue? Launch blogs in both languages which run independent of one another? Or compromise their bilingual site, launch in English and hope there’s not a French-Canadian backlash? ”
Head over and give Darren your insight if you have any.
It’s a question that I’ve heard asked in numerous ways and from numerous bloggers recently. Blogging is a multi-lingual medium yet unless you either employ a translator/s or rely on a dodgy automated translating tool it’s very difficult to reach more than one language group at a time.
I’ve been approached on numerous occasions by people wanting to translate my content into other languages on their own blogs and have often wished I could have sections for different languages with some of my best posts here at ProBlogger. The only real way I could see this working would be on some type of revenue share basis where the translator took a share of whatever was earned from the content that they translated.
I know there are some bilingual bloggers out there (who are producing the same content in different languages) but from what I can tell it tends to either be a drawn out process, an expensive one or one with low quality results.
I’ve asked this before – but I’d be interested to see examples of blogs that are tackling the multilingual issue in creative ways.
