Anyone want to be a site editor in another language?
The long-time reader will know that I have a fairly broad selection of daily reads, including many political, religious, and gaming sites and blogs. The long-time reader probably does not know, however, that I also follow a few game blogs of a very different sort. Perhaps I should capitalize the ‘g’, as well; these blogs pertain to Game, the social interaction study and model that is primarily the purview of pickup artists, but also works as a general means to understanding interactions between men and women in social (and intimate) situations.
One such blog is The Spearhead, and I was struck by a post there recently in which the author spoke about his desire to cater to his international visitors by blogging not only in English going forward, but in other languages as well.
Now, I’ve tried before to learn other languages (Ukrainian & French, specifically) and the result has always been the same: I get praise from my teachers for my ability to properly inflect the words I’m reciting, but I’m never able to actually internalize the language in my memory so as to be able to draw upon it outside of the classroom context. In short: I can mimic a language well enough if I have something to read in front of me, but I seem to be completely unable to learn new languages.
Now, in looking at my site reports in StatCounter, I observe that traffic to Aiera comes from many countries. The United States ranks highest, not surprisingly, and is followed immediately by Canada (my home country)…but the remaining eight countries in the top ten are all European:
- 32.60% United States
- 12.40% Canada
- 11.60% Germany
- 8.40% United Kingdom
- 4.00% Finland
- 3.40% Portugal
- 3.20% Italy
- 3.00% France
- 2.80% Ireland
- 2.80% Australia
Some of these countries are also English-speaking countries…indeed, running the blog in just English, I cater to the national language of 59% of my visitors.
However, I’m thinking it might be nice if I could bring on board two or three (or more) additional editors who would be willing to transcribe — occasionally, if not frequently/consistently — site news from English into German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish, or maybe even Finnish. I realize that this would technically result it some duplication of posts and content (given Aiera’s integration with e.g. Twitter, I don’t want to go the route of using the translation plugin that Team Return uses)…but I think it would be a nice feature to offer, even if only on occasion, to some of my visitors from countries not situated on the North American continent.
If you’d be interested in assisting with this endeavour, good reader, either drop a comment below or drop me a line privately.
About that “maybe even Finnish”…
I highly doubt you’ll ever be able to find a single person from Finland who’s into Ultimas and doesn’t read and write decent-to-good English. Translation to Finnish would therefore be huge waste of time and effort for someone.
Eh, fair enough.
I mean, to be fair, pretty much everyone who visits the site here has some grasp of the English language. Furthermore, I’ve generally come to expect — both due to word of mouth and personal experience — that Europeans are more likely to be bilingual (or trilingual, or even more than that), speaking at least the language of their home country and English.
Having said as much, English is not a first language for many of the site visitors, and some have said as much in their correspondence to me. It certainly wouldn’t hurt, I don’t think, to offer at least a couple of other languages on the site here, if possible.
Not necessarily Finnish. German would, for example, be a good one to add, and I’ve already had an offer to do as much.
Hey Ken, somehow I skipped this news. You can count on me if there’s a need to translate articles into german. I would gladly give a hand from time to time.
What languages have some of the games actually been translated to – German, Spanish, French? Those translations for ther site might make a lot more sense (and be more easily done too?)
Aye, those are the common ones, Finn.
Well, I could help with Spanish if you want. I’ll probably do a better job with that than with finding and publishing news on the site.
Hey, WTF_Dragon:
1) I lost my login credentials to the site with my old laptop that finally kicked the bucket. If you could reset the password or something so I could get back at it, that’d be great.
2) I know enough French to do translations, though I will qualify that with saying Canadian/Quebecios French is quite different from the French spoken elsewhere.
~Wiz