I recently finished reading Sarah Maddox’s splendid book on technical communication in a wiki environment, Confluence, Tech Comm, Chocolate. It answered most of my concerns on doing tech comm on a wiki, except for one: localization.
Tag: localization
Blogging in a foreign language
It would be ideal if all blogs were written in the author’s native language. However, in many cases that is not practical.
What if the native language of your best subject-matter expert is not spoken in your main market areas? What if you are in charge of marketing in multiple countries, each with their own language?
I have previously explored this subject in my post Translating your blog, is there a good way to do it? In that post, I concluded that blogs are not ideal material for translation, and better results could be achieved by translating articles that are based on blog posts.
Now I want to explore this subject from a slightly different point of view. Even if translation does not work, what if your awesome expert happens to speak the language you want to blog in, say English, as a foreign language? Continue reading “Blogging in a foreign language”
Translating your blog, is there a good way to do it?
Whereas English may at times seem prevalent online, the majority of people in the world do not speak it. Furthermore, only a small minority speak English as a native language. For all other languages, the audience figures look even worse, save perhaps for Chinese.
Therefore, providing content for people in their native language is an attractive idea for many bloggers and companies. A static website can be translated, no problem, but what about a blog, with comments and all? Continue reading “Translating your blog, is there a good way to do it?”