Foreign language weblogs

I’m currently subscribed to over 200 feeds, so it’s really annoying when I come across a weblog like Christoph Görn’s, which he writes in both German and English. Now, my German is good enough to be able to read most of his posts (although my vocabulary is clearly getting rusty), but it requires my brain to go through a massive context shift when I’m reading through all my posts, and probably brings me almost to a halt for a good five minutes.

Sadly for me, Christoph makes excellent posts about Jabber, Bluetooth and presence-based applications, so I’m clearly just going to have to live with it. Or find out how to get my aggregator to do automatic Google translations when I’m not looking 🙂

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7 thoughts on “Foreign language weblogs”

  1. The trouble with the Google translator service is that it does tend to mangle any expressions that are not 100% literal.

    Alternatively you could just reconfigure your brain to cope with switching between languages 🙂 I find it easier to switch to German than French, though, I must admit.

  2. Hallo Phil, danke für die Blumen. I will try to get things better interlationalized, e.g. post in english.

  3. Hey, no problem Christoph – it does me good to stretch my language muscles – it’s not as if they get much practice.

    Also, your comment reminds me that I’m still not serving UTF-8. Must fix!

  4. You linguistic wossname you. I’ll have you know that the five minute disorientation in question is actually likely to help protect you from senile dementia in, ooh, um, about sixty years’ time. So get practicing!

    OTOH, getting your aggregator to do automatic Google translations should not be much of a problem. You can guess at the language in which a post is written by the characters, the letter frequency, and so forth.

    Sonst hast du immer noch die Möglichkeit, dein Deutsch zu üben und zu verbessern. Kann doch nicht schaden, oder? 🙂

  5. Pfah, Ich sollte, aber natuerlich ich bin zu faul 🙂

    Oh, and my grammar stinks.

    wouldn’t it be nice if one day all the promises of weblogging tools which generate a correct lang attribute via text-analysis actually come true?

  6. Em: actually all my post in the rss feed are having some dc:language tag, so guessing the language shouldnt be the problem. and… I needed to hack it into WordPress by myself, the internet seems to be all english 🙁

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