I found this interesting video posted by Stephanie Booth and I liked it very much because it addresses the challenges and strategies behind multilingual blogging.
I agree with her that there are only strategies to this which are:
1) Two separate blogs: One blog for each language. As she says “it is monolingual blogging” but twice
2) Total translation: Manually translate every post, but as you know it requires a lot of work
3) Machine Translation: A low quality solution as there is machine that can translate as good as a human. Probably the worst option of all.
4) Blog in only one language: If you blog in english, your audience is much more wider but if you blog in your local language you lose the opportunity of going global
I’ve been thinking about all this this for several days, and actually I [intlink id="57" type="post"]wrote something[/intlink] about this days ago, but watching CNN in Spanish made me think of the right approach to take. I don’t know if you have ever had a chance to watch CNN in Spanish but if you noticed, this show is not a direct translation of CNN in english.
CNN in Spanish has its own group of Latino news presenters and the content it is suited to like a Hispanic audience. Yes, sometimes, it contains news or conent that are translated from english, but they try to make everything as Hispanic as possible.This made realize the fact that a blog, is not much different than a TV News show. It is more important to be “Multi-Cultural” rather than just “Multi-Lingual”.
You could translate a piece of content in perfect local language, but if the content in question is not suited to attract local audiences then it doesn’t really matter.
So because of this, I’ve chosen to work on two separate blogs, one in english and another in Spanish. Although I will try to translate most of the posts, this would not be possible all the times. I need to make sure that the content I’m presenting for each language is attractive to the audience for each language.
UPDATE: I have completely given up the idea of of blogging in two languages, so I killed my blog in Spanish sometime ago, and I decided to blog only in English, you might wonder why, well the reason is that most of the information I read and listen in podcasts, about Internet Marketing, is already in English, so every time I think about it, I think in English as well. Also most of the audience interested in the subject is used to read it in English, so my advice is, take into account who your main audience is and blog to them in their language. Only try to blog in several languages if your audience asks you to do it and is large enough to justify the effort.
Héctor Sánchez is a blogger from Ocotlán, Jalisco and he is currently residing in Guadalajara. Héctor is a Public Accountant from Universdidad Panamericana with a Posgrade in Corporate Finance from the same university, and he is currently working as financial analyst for Hewlett Packard. Even though he works in Finance for a living, in his spare time, he is a geek and he likes to build blogs, websites and studies everything related with Internet Marketing and several ways of building businesses online. He is also an active member of Toastmasters, where is the President in turn of his local club, Toastmasters Atlas Chapalita Club.
