multilingual-brainstorming

The boundaries on the web are linguistic. An increasing number of people have multilingual websites and blogs. However, existing blog software, although localizable, is designed with the monolingual author/reader in mind. HTML specs are designed mainly for monolingual web pages.

• How should similar content in different languages (whether translated, re-phrased, abstracted) be organised and related?
• How should blogging software make this possible?
• Three levels of difficulty (or subproblems):
  • Markup
  • Interface for the reader
  • Authoring process
  • (And a fourth: integration in specific blogging tools)

Research

We can start with a multilingual blog safari: multilingual-examples

Let's gather links to posts which have already reflected on this question or tried to find a solution (separate page for these?):

• http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2006/01/22/requirements-for-a-multilingual-wordpress-plugin/
• http://epeus.blogspot.com/2005_01_01_epeus_archive.html#110513233021128637
• http://blogamundo.net/dev/2005/10/31/a-nice-language-switching-widget/
• http://doocy.net/archives/2005/01/20/the-multilingual-acknowledgement/
• http://climbtothestars.org/archives/2004/07/11/multilingual-weblog/

Related documents:

• http://www.la-grange.net/2002/09/03.html
• http://www.w3.org/TR/html401/types.html#type-links

Trying to formulate the problem again

Many web authors have a multilingual readership. This means a readership composed of people who are monolingual in language A, monolingual in language B, people who are perfectly bilingual and the whole range of language proficiency in-between. Often, the solution found for "multilingual" content is to create "mirror" versions of a site in different languages. This functions for sites which are static or are maintained by a huge team of people. It is not viable for a blog or forms of publication which encourage people to express themselves online by making it easy to publish.