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Wednesday, March 26, 2008

Multilingual blog for positive changes

Now this blog aspire to blog for positive changes, but unfortunately while the author may be multilingual, he is only proficient in blogging in English, but cannot proficiently blog in other languages, including numerous languages that originated from India such as Tamil "spoken by Tamils in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, Malaysia, Mauritius and emigrant communities around the world (from Wikipedia, edited), Hindi (Hindi films are very popular in Malaysia), Arabic (many Muslims in Malaysia can read Arabic because of their Muslim religion), etc. To be able to reach such audiences, he would need the help of India translation, a translation service which can help with Hindi translation as well as other languages originating from India.

In the recent Malaysian General Election, many are of the opinion that the Indians, which traditionally vote for the ruling Barisan Nasional (National Coalition) voted against them instead and their votes could have contributed to the huge reversal suffered by the Barisan Nasional. It would be great if this blog also contain posts in Indian languages, or perhaps in another blog. On the other hand, if a new blog is to be created for Indian language or languages, it will have to start from "ground zero” that is with no PageRank and not yet indexed by search engines. The PageRank of this blog at time of publishing is 3, which is not bad, and can be found by search engines. I just checked the hits (visitors) counter, and this blogs have received hits (visits) by surfers searching for "dap malaysia" (DAP is acronym for Democratic Action Party, "tony pua service centre" (Tony Pua very recently successfully wrested the PJ Utara Parliamentary seat from incumbent Member of Parliament Chew Mei Fun. She was a very hard working Member of Parliament, but unfortunately, she was hardworking not in the right areas. She was very hardworking in taking care of things like drains which are actually the responsibilities of MBPJ (Majlis Bandaran Petaling Jaya in Bahasa Malaysia or Petaling Jaya City Hall in English). However, voters have matured to some extend and many must have felt that the more important role of a Member of Parliament is in the Parliament itself where crucial decisions, policies, amendments to the Constitutions, enactments of various Acts, etc., are made) and voted accordingly. Tony Pua Kiam Wee at a young age of 36, has now become one of the youngest Member of Parliament with many years of service to his country ahead of him.

It would thus be a great waste to start a new Indian language blog as it will take time to get indexed by search engines and thus "findable" by the search engines, plus lose the advantages or a fairly respectable PageRank. However, Indians only form 7.1% of Malaysia's population according to Wikipedia. Malays, which represent an estimated 50.4% of the Malaysian population and to be able to reach the Malays, it would also be great to have some blogs in Bahasa Malaysia (derived from the Malay language, in fact, can be considered identical, just calling something with a different name only. Now this blogger can blog in Malay, although with much less proficiency as compared to English. What this blogger cannot do is to blog in Arabic, a language which many Malays are proficient in. For this, he would need Arabic translation.

Yes, that would be great. To blog in Tamil, Hindi and Arabic. However, those translation services are not free and this blogger is not a millionaire. Further, he is neither a politician nor a Member of Parliament. He, unfortunately would not want to spend money on translation services, so looks like this blog will be predominately an English blog, and hopefully, a couple of posts in Bahasa Malaysia (Malaysia Language or Malay).

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

You may want to take a look at www.lingotip.com.
You can create a widget box with your translated blogs. Translations can either be provided by you (and then the service is free) or by one of the site's translators (where there is usually a fee, but prices are reasonable because of their bidding platform).
You just paste the widget in your site and your readers click on a language button to toggle between languages.

Anonymous said...

I was enjoying your website and wondering if you could benefit from including some multilingual flash cards. They are available as a google gadget and are very minimalistic and non-intrusive. They are currently available in French, Italian, Japanese and Spanish.

If you'd like to see the flash cards, go to this link:
http://www.theLanguageBear.com/flash.php

If there is anything else that you think the Language Bear can offer you, please let me know.

The Language Bear