This text is an almost automated translation of my blog post in German over here. I hope it still gets my points across.
For quite a while I’ve been thinking about multilingualism in Social Networks. Especially when services are still young - and I’ve noticed this particularly on Flickr, Twitter and Facebook - the lingua franca is English, even among users who have another language in common. This has the great advantage that it doesn’t take long to start conversations with people from all over the world - one of the attractions of the internet for me.
Once a platform is getting slightly more popular or when it gets an interface in different languages, people use it a lot more in their native language - which is as understandable as it is okay.
But it leads to a problem that I have had for a while: On most of these platforms I have a pretty wild mix of friends and contacts from different countries and languages.
But now if one of my social objects gets a comment in German, I realize that some of my international friends who don’t speak German, withdraw from the conversation.
Some of them even contact me in some other way - messenger, email or direct messages - to tell me that they really have no desire to comment on my pictures since the conversation usually switches quite fast to German.
And I’m no difference - if the comments on a picture are only in Chinese, Russian, Bavarian, or one of the other thousands of languages that I do not understand - I don’t really feel like barging into a conversation with a probably completely inappropriate comment in English.
Now I wonder two things:
- How can we, as users of sites that don’t offer any tools to handle that, contact to people in both an international lingua franca and our native language?
- How can we build a platform that provides something that helps users with this problem? A very good example of how it can work is Qype, where you can write a review to any place in different languages.
Ideas? Thoughts?
