Whether you read this blog in Italian with the title "Scintille di pensiero", German with "Gedanke Funken", Spanish with "Chispas del pensamiento, or any of the other non-english versions of this site, you are welcome.
I’m always interested in learning how to reach the very broadest audience. And when I say broad, I mean language, culture and user capability. I try to remember simple accessible functions like dropping-in alt and title attributes into my pics and links.
My latest addition to the blog has been the odiogo reader. I’m fascinated to know if anyone has tried it yet and what they think. For those vision impaired, this feature provides an alternative way to "read" the posts. I have found the voice to be fairly pleasant and easy to understand.
Accessibility and internationalization are huge concerns that are often overlooked by bloggers and other web publishers. It is an area where I hope to become ever more effective and sensitive to in the future. While the issues are complex, some of the solutions can be quite simple.
For those who have the "why should I really care" thoughts. There are some self-serving advantages to publishing a more accessible site, namely readership. Just taking the translation flag function alone, I garner significant traffic daily from the Google search engines in those languages. This also contributes to a growing PageRank. Thoughtsparks.net as a domain has been going for just five months. Today it has a PageRank of 3. Not too shabby in that short period of time. The ranking I believe is in part due to the strong exposure across multiple language indexes.
Don’t take my word for it on these ideas. Implement some accessible tools like auto-translation, watch your web analytics, and see the affect it has on your referrals. I’d be interested to know what’s working for you.
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4 Comments
It is a terrific idea to have your blog published in more than one language, after all, it is the “World Wide Web”. This is going to be even more important as the internet starts saturating more of the world.
What are you using to do the translation? Also, does it translate comments back for you? I would hate to have a whole bunch of comments go unanswered
Mike, I use the plug-in from http://www.nothing2hide.com. It’s WordPress plug-in but I know there are many out there. I like their implementation much better than the goofy altavista Babelfish, which although was an early one, has been trumped by the late comers.
I have not gotten many comments from folks in alternate languages. Most of the time they’ve written in English. My empirical evidence has to do more with web analytics, but I do have a number of international readers.
Phil,
Thanks so much for the heads up on Odiogo. I had never heard of this prior to now. After listening to it translate your most recent article, I have to agree, it really is not too shabby! I do believe I will be playing around with this program in the very near future.
Thanks again Phil, and keep up the good works!
Dave, Yeah I’m pretty pleased with it. One upside is that if it reads back a funny sounding word, that is often a misspelling. I’ve caught a couple that way. It took them a couple days to get back with me with an ID to create the account, so be patient with it. Implementing was a snap with WordPress. I’m sure they’ve made provision for other blogs as well, blogspot included.