When I started my weblog in November 2002, it was clear to me it had to be in English, since most of my international network of people involved in KM either had an Anglo-American backgroud, or shared English with me as a foreign language. Already after one or two months I started thinking however about blogging in Dutch, my native language, and in German.
This to start building a web presence in both the Netherlands and Germany, and thus hopefully attracting more local contacts.
Today I fumbled around with the templates, and figured out how to get two blogs in one page. Thanks to Marysia, who gave me the vital clue (categories!), by explaining how she posted to her bilingual blog in Polish and English.
I’m not sure if I will be able to blog in all three languages frequently, but I will just wait and see. Anyway, the Dutch/German bilingual Interdependent Thoughts blog is now on-line.
And both languages got their own RSS feeds:
(Dutch)
(German)
Not sure if you are familiar with it, but The Blogalization Community (http://blogalization.org/community/weblog.php ) is a pretty interesting place for multi-lingual bloggers.
“Blogalization is an open community of bloggers who post in one or more languages about material discovered in one or more other languages
We also cross-post entries from pages in other languages hosted on this site, with brief translations of key points. .
So, if I have languages A and B and you have languages B and C, we can share memes across all three, and the monolingual can transmit memes across language barriers.”
For us monolinguals (Americans, mostly, I’d guess) it would be terrfic to get exposure to more of the Dutch and German KM blogs you have access to.
Hi Evano,
yes I am familiar with Blogalization. Also link to it from this site 😉 Thanks for pointing it out though. It’s an interesting idea, but I’m not yet really sure if it will really work.
Cheers,Ton
Yes, I’m not sure it will work as advertised either. For some odd reason, not many translators blog, although the translation forums yield good material. I’ve thought about porting everything to Tiki to offer a fuller community experience. I think pMachine was a poor choice, but I wanted to learn about PHP. The fact is that “blogalizing” is most needed for contributing “foreign language” voices to discussions in English. Hopefully, as more and more content is sedimented into the blog and wiki (still a strange concept to most people outside of the tech community), the search engines will find us more readily, and the topic of translation will become a more central one. Who knows? We’ll just have to see.
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