BlogWorks: From bilingual newsrooms to multilingual blogs

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June 29, 2005

From bilingual newsrooms to multilingual blogs

By Kai Blum

Corporations and their target audiences are becoming more and more multinational and the importance of Spanish in the U.S. is also rising, but there are no well-known bi- and multilingual company blogs yet.

The currently closest thing to a multilingual corporate blog is, as Luistxo Fernandez points out, a company news site that has an index page with the latest posts - the newer ones up, the other down - that allows the reader to switch languages by the click of a button or link. The news sites of DaimlerChrysler and Siemens are good examples for such a bilingual approach in a near-blogging environment. Therefore, it would come as no surprise if companies that already have this kind of multilingual web publishing capability and experience are going to be pioneers in publishing multilingual blogs.

Multilingual web publishing experience or not, anyone who is going to attempt to publish corporate blogs in more than one language can draw from the knowledge of non-corporate multilingual bloggers such as the aforementioned Fernandez, who blogs in three languages (Basque, English, Spanish). Fernandez summarized his experiences in Ten Commandments for bilingual blogs, a list of features with which true multilingual blogs should comply. Many of the principles, e.g. monolingual pages, language change options on every page, and interface and content bilingualism are already familiar features of multilingual corporate news sites. This again makes it most likely that corporations with such communications experience are going to be first to take the step from bilingual newsrooms to bi- and multilingual blogs.

Posted by staff at June 29, 2005 01:01 PM