Part Two
This is part two of this series because I realized, after finishing the last post, that I didn’t address the Language part of my post.
Crossing International Lines
The internet works so well because English is the world’s universal language. Most people in the world can speak a few words of English, no matter from where they hail or their first language. People on the internet seem to understand that people all over the world can understand something written in English. It is also easier to translate pages to and from English.
One thing I run into daily is the slaughtering of the English language. I understand that when you are trying to communicate in a language other than your native language, it’s tough. I speak some German and some Navajo. I slaughter those myself. I really do understand.
It seems that the only people that comment on this site are foreigners. I have removed nearly all the comments from this site because the comments are so hard to read. After a little research, I figured out that many of the comments were originally written in another language, then translated via google translate or some other translation machine, then pasted into the comment box.
Translation applications cannot replace knowledge of syntax, rules of grammar, and use of slang when translating text. The resulting translation is mediocre at best. Sifting through these comments, daily, I find that I am annoyed beyond words that so many people would post poorly worded comments just to post their link to my site, and that the links lead primarily to sites in other languages. Using google’s page translate function, I am able to attempt to discover the topic of the content, but given that a machine is translating, sometimes even that is frustrating beyond words.
When google’s bots go out to determine how many and the source of links to and from a given site, they don’t consider the language of the pages on which the links appear, only the number of links. If site owners had to police the quality of the links, I believe this would be avoided.
Just because English translates so well to so many languages doesn’t mean that other languages translate well to English. Please keep this in mind if you want your comment to be visible on my site. While google doesn’t require it, I do try to police the quality of the links on this site. If I understand what is said, and the topic of your link, then chances are, the true readers of my site will, also. That is the criteria for adding a link to a comment.