The language of Social Media

I had forgotten that I had flunked Spanish in college, until I arrived at Evento Blog Espana. There were over 500 Spanish-speaking bloggers there, many of them who spoke no English. My being a keynote speaker was justified by a book I co-authored, which had been transferred into 10 languages including Turkish and ancient Chinese--but not Spanish. Still, I shared more in common with the folks I met, than with people who live in my own physical neighborhood.  Recently I told a neighbor that I had co-authored a book on blogging and he expressed surprise that I was interested in the lumber industry.

Yet there was never a communications problem. Attendees were bloggers.  They looked like bloggers and talked about Twitter and Vista and Windows live and why Twitter was so extremely cool. In the end, we shared passion about social media and how it is transforming business, government and culture. From the dais, speaking through a translator, I advised them to try blogging more in English.

If the world of social media is to evolve into a single world, one of two things need to happen:

(1) Translation  technology needs to get a lot better than we experience at Google Translate or Babelfish. There is evidence that this is starting to happen. Over at dotSUB.com, you can get near-instant subtitles in a variety of languages for online videos.

(2) There needs to be a universal language. Increasingly, that language is English.  In countries where parents were taught Russian in schools, the kids today are being taught English. It has very little to do with politics and a great deal to do with economics.  The largest and most lucrative markets are English speaking.

It felt a bit awkward, standing on a stage where there were only two English speaking presenters, myself and Twitter's Biz Stone facing 500 Spanish speakers, It felt like I was trying to push an American agenda, which is rarely, if ever, the case.

But most of the bloggers I met were business focused.  Social media for them is in part a business toolset and I feel strongly that they will serve many of their needs by evolving from the local network to the international network requiring communications in English.

I also have a selfish objective. I met a lot of cool people and I have a hunch they have cool blogs and I would like to be able to read and understand them without the goofy intervention of Google Translate.   

I am an admirer of the Dalai Lama who is often quoted as saying we are all alike and I believe it is true.  But there are so many ways for communications to break down and for people to not understand how alike we are. 

The more of us who share a common language, the less often that will happen.  If English is not the language of choice, then go look at the link I inserted to Biz Stone's blog.  We could all just learn to speak cat.

Comments

[Kare Anderson]

I heard you gave news-you-could-use... even the DL would appreciate that

[Roland Hesz]

"The largest and most lucrative markets are English speaking."

Yes, like China and the former Soviet states.
English is a really, really important language. As a software developer and someone who hangs on the net a lot I know it well.

But I also know that if you speak russian, you can earn twice the normal salary in sales related positions - most of the people in the former Soviet states don't speak english only their native and russian.

Not to mention China.

So, I would dare to say that the most lucrative markets are the ones where most of the people, including management does not speak english.

Will this change? Probably. In 10 or 20 years probably it will.

"I advised them to try blogging more in English."
That's really good, but then it depends on who they want to reach. I blog in english, but then I don't want to reach the local people. If I wanted to do that, hungarian would be the language of choice for me.

So, I say that the language of your blog should be chosen with your general goal in mind.
And your comfortability with the chosen language.

"But most of the bloggers I met were business focused. "
For these, english maybe is a better choice. Unless they want to reach the local business, where people speak only spanish, or catalan, or vasco.

So I say english is important if you want to "go international", but for a local business it can be the one thing that cuts you off from your prospective partners.

But that's only my personal view, I am not a professional blogger or such, and even can be dead wrong.

[JJ]

Why would anybody want to blog in English? I do, and fill one of the slots of the rare nich Spaniards-working-as-scientists-writing in English-about-Spanish affairs and there are a few days when visitors go into double digits. Which is probably _not_ a reason to stop blogging... but, really, it's bettet to write about what you know, to people you know, using the language you know.