Blog Bilingualization
What is the best solution to hosting a bilingual blog in your opinion? Posting everything twice? Posting parallel text? Using an automated (ahem…questionable) translation service like Babelfish or Google? I really want to be able to feature some of my posts in both Japanese and English, but I’ve not yet found a satisfactory approach.
I recently caught the link to an article on Weblog Tools Collection that was featured at the bottom of the administrative WordPress dashboard about 2 amazing plug-ins. One of them, the Worldwide Lexicon plug-in, caught my eye. It’s an interesting PHP based solution to hosting a multilingual blog. Here’s a blurb from their website explaining the wiki-style translation concept.
WWL makes it easy for people to view, contribute and edit translations to websites. It is similar to Wikipedia (anyone can contribute to the index of translations, or edit translations sent by other users). Any website with an audience will have bilingual readers, some of whom will be happy to contribute translations for other people to read.
I recently installed the plug-in and fooled around with it. I translated a really short article I wrote, just to see how it’d function. My problem? The plug-in is kind of ugly. It places an expandable list of languages at the top of each post, and if a translation is available, apparently it displays the first line in blue as a preview. Ugly. What’s more, it removes any content that I had on the post - a flash player, pictures, whatever - and I don’t want to publish the paths to these files on a 3rd party server. On the main page, whenever more than a single post is being viewed, it lists the other languages as “undefined.” I don’t know if there’s a problem with my particular theme or some other code that I’ve customized, but it’s really unpolished. Then again, it’s still in testing. So that’s fair enough, I guess. If you guys are listening, these problems would be the biggest hangups I can think of.
Otherwise, the idea really appeals to me. Allowing anyone to translate or edit translations on your site would really open it up to more readers. And since the translations are stored elsewhere, changing themes and the like wouldn’t really mess it up. Compared to the other ideas that I’ve seen for making a bilingual blog, this approach is much less demanding. The integration would be a piece of cake if it worked better and looked nicer. Hrrrm….
I’m still fooling around with it. But if you imagine, like I do, that we could have translation help from our blogroll buddies, or site visitors, or collaborations between the community as a whole, and you want to help support the plug-in, feel free to download it.
In the meantime, while that thing is getting developed, debugged, and smoothed out, does anyone have any good ideas for bilingual WordPress blogs? We’ve gotta be careful, because as Alex knows too well, sometimes you lose all of your foreign language entries if you do something funny. Makes the whole enterprise a little shaky. Anyone have a good take? Successful blog? Hints? I’m rambling, now, which means it’s time to stop writing and click the publish button.