May 1, 06 -- Dave Sifry, founder of Technorati, had some interesting statistics and observations on the state of the blogosphere, with a focus on language and country related issues (for the full article, see http://www.sifry.com/alerts/archives/000433.html). Some of the main points of interest he stated are:
- English, while being the language of the majority of early bloggers, has fallen to less than a third of all blog posts in April 2006.
- Japanese and Chinese language blogging has grown significantly.
- Japanese, Chinese, English, Spanish, Italian, Russian, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and German are the languages with the greatest number of posts tracked by Technorati.
Using Sifri's statistics as a starting point, we would like to make a few observations of our own with a special focus on the language industry. Since more than two-thirds of the bloggers in the world are blogging in another language: (a) there's a lot of content out there that blog readers are missing and that (b) if you are a blogger, your blog has a much wider potential audience than you are reaching now if your blog is only in English.
The future of automatic blog translation using Machine Translation is going to be strong. Just as strong as free website translation has become (with both search engine giants Google and Yahoo now offering free website translation). In fact, we can anticipate a future where the major blog search engines, such as Technorati, will allow users to search blog content written in other languages. The search will be done in English, with the blog search engine caching the Machine Translations of foreign blogs and serving up the translated content when a match is found.
If you are a blogger, it may make sense for you to offer MT versions of your blog in other languages using a free translation tool. Global Translations has developed a new blog translation tool that allows you to publish your blog and RSS feeds in French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian and Catalan. If you would like to try this free tool, send an email to info@global-translation-services.com and insert the words Blog Translation in the subject line.
1:30:34 PM 
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