Lost (and found) in Translation

From Berkman Fellow and Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman...

One of the major focuses of Global Voices over the past year has been translating content from other languages into English, and translating the resulting English content into as many languages as possible. We were a little slow in realizing the importance of translation when we started GV - a large number of the blogs we were following were in English, and it seemed like added context to English-language blog posts might represent the majority of the work we did. The vast majority of early blogging tools were in English, which meant that unless someone wrote a guide to blogging in a local language, non-English speakers were at a distinct disadvantage. And many multilingual bloggers concluded that they’d have a better audience if they wrote in English, as few of their countrymen were reading content online.

But blogging has spread rapidly, and a site that promises to give you a picture of conversations in the global blogosphere has to consider a universe that’s much larger than English-language blogs. According to Technorati, by early 2006 Japanese was challenging English as the dominant language of the blogosphere, and Chinese was a close third. I strongly suspect that Technorati undercounts Chinese blogs, many of which don’t send updates to pingservers. One way or another, English-language content represents less than 40% of total blog content, possibly less than a third of all content...

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For more of Ethan's frequent project updates and musings check out his blog: My Heart's in Accra.