Multilingual Content?

Multilingual Content?

Posted Sep 4, 2007 8:33 UTC (Tue) by mlawren (guest, #10136)
Parent article: LWN advertising update

For quite a while I've been wondering if LWN could expand its readership by offering translated content to non-English (as a mother tongue) speakers. By most accounts English speakers are becoming a minority on the net, which indicates a potentially significant untapped market.

I don't know if a reasonable percentage of those non-English speaking groups are interested[1] in the technical level of detail of LWN. It is possible (likely?) that non-English speaking (as a mother tongue)[2] technical people already have a good understanding of English. However given the number of articles and books I've seen in the German language sphere I think it is worth considering. If the extra subscriptions for a language group turn out to be worth more than the cost of a translator then maybe there is a business case.

LWN doesn't necessarily have to employ professional translators either. I'm sure certain existing multilingual subscribers would consider a reduced subscription or a rebate scheme for providing translations.

Unfortunately, having worked on a multilingual CMS I'm aware of just how much work it takes to engineer such functionality into an existing tool. The easy way out (to avoid presenting foreign language content to the wrong people) is to duplicate instances (a la Wikipedia) but that has it's own issues. Doing it The Right Way[tm] means you bear the cost up front, but can add languages to your hearts desire afterwards...

Hopefully this gives some food for thought.

[1] Maybe adding the Accept-Language header to your apache logs would give some interesting results?

[2] non-English-speaking-as-a-mother-tongue is bloody convoluted. Anyone know of a better way to describe this case in less words?

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