Blog Bilingualization

August 24th, 2007
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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.

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  • In my case, my audiences are completely different, so I keep two separate blogs. I rarely feel like writing the same thing for both my (now defunct) English blog and Japanese blog, so this is not a problem. I'm not sure what happened to Alex's entries, but I've had something similar happen to me when upgrading my photoblog. That being said, you should keep backups of your database and files in case anything screwy happens.
  • HI. I am the designer of the Worldwide Lexicon system. Thanks for the feedback.

    As you mention, the system is in beta testing. It works well in most situations, but one of the challenges for us is making something that can be embedded in a wide variety of sites and publishing platforms, without forcing them to know much about how it works. We currently support WordPress, and also have a PHP library for people who want more control over the way WWL appears in their sites. Movable Type is coming soon, as are Ruby and ASP libraries. We are open sourcing most of the system so that people can adapt it as needed.

    WWL is not limited to WordPress. It treats WordPress as a front-end to a global translation cache. When people post translations to your blog, they will appear on your site, as if they are part of it. They will also appear in the translation cache and search service. This makes translated texts visible to search engines, and makes them easy to link to. So, someone could translate one of your posts. Someone else could find it, and then link to the translation.

    Our goal with WWL is not to create a destination, but to provide publishers, readers and translators with a suite of tools that are embedded in a wide range of platforms. If we do our job right, two years from now, people will be reading translated content without knowing how they found it.

    PS - if you know any WP style gurus, we'd welcome suggestions about how to make the WP plugin play nicely with a wider range of WP styles.
  • Wow! I never actually expected someone connected with the project to respond. Ha ha. I unfortunately don't have any WP guru friends - which is apparent I think, just looking at my site. Anyway, I'm really interested to see how your ideas unfold and will definitely continue to test the WP implementation as it develops. It's really promising. Thanks for stopping by!
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