As all of you should have noticed by now: English is not my native language and I somehow doubt that I’m even good in it. So why do I blog in it? Quite simple: Whenever I search the web for information I’m looking for articles written in German or English simply because I can’t read anything else.
And this has also become my main motivation for writing my weblog in English. This way I can reach much more people … not that my content is really that intersting but anyway. But this approach also has its downside, esp. for me: I’m far better in expressing myself in my native language (who isn’t?) and I often think twice before I write a new post in English simply because it’s not as easy for me as writing the same post in German would be. Sometimes this might be a good thing since it’s like a filter pushing some crap back into the queue, but sometimes not.
If you’re someone who’s been reading this weblog for some time now you will have noticed that every now and then I think about also making a German weblog or do some other mixed language blogging. It’s again this time of the year. But how to decide in what language a certain post should be written now? Should I write posts that are probably intersting for my “local” friends in German? Would this be enough content to justify another Wordpress/Drupal/Txp/… installation? And simply making a translation of each post to the other weblog is too much work for my taste.
Yesterday night … or today I read this post by shar israel which somehow made me think about this whole issue again. I’m not really a weblogging expert but at least as far as I can tell the German blogosphere is alive. Otherwise there wouldn’t be so many German RSS feeds in my feedlist ;) And then I read following comment by Alexander
And many people - like myself - find it more and more gratifying to just blog in english, which is a dangerous development.
Yes, exactly what I’m thinking except for the “gratifying” perhaps as it’s for me more like a compromise. Dangerous because (to exaggerate a little bit) if we continue this way, the German language will not make it into Web2.0 at all, something that is IMO combined with a loss of the German culture on the net as a whole. But don’t worry, I won’t go down this road now.
To sum it up: I think I have only two real alternatives:
- Blog in German
- Blog in English
Sure, making translations every now and then to the other language is certainly possible (similiar to what is currently happening on the werbeblogger.de with the whole Heidi Klum problematic) but writing every post in two languages is (as I’ve already written) too much hassle. I honestly don’t really know what I should do about this … arghh.
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