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For anyone that may run a blog on the internet, we all know how culturally diverse and international the world wide web is with a recent surge of internet users from all regions of the world, china in particular. This now means you have to potential to reach out to an international readership and with this comes its own hurdles.

For example what would you do if you receive a comment in a different language to the one your blog is based on? Have you ever thought how you’d over come the problem?

What Would You Do?

This could leave many people asking themselves several questions..

• Do I delete it?, I mean.. its spam right?
• Do I leave it unmoderated?
• Do I just accept it and hope it’s not spam?

Many many bloggers would simply look no further than the delete button which they may justify in their own rights. For example if the admin cannot understand what the comment is saying then how is the rest of the community going to benefit.. or suffer in its absence?

Another smaller minority (like myself) would just leave it unmoderated until there comes a point when you’ve just got to clean out your comments.. in which case it would be highly likely that this would just lead to a mass execution of these posts.

Again another smaller minority such as smaller blogs looking to make their community look active would just accept the risks (of it being spam) and allow the comment.

In my opinion I would never delete any comment right off and the fact that it is in a different language is no exception. Because it is in a different language however means that we need to do a little more research and take a little more time to process the comment.

What Do We Do Here At B2L?

You may be wondering how we tackle (or would tackle) comments on B2L in a foreign language. Well, there is a short list of things to follow to route out if the comment is genuine and then how to present it to the rest of your visitors. Lets take a look..

Step 1: Is it a spam comment?

Firstly before we do anything we want to see if this comment is a ‘real’ comment and not just a spammer or automated spambot hitting your site. There are a few easy ways of identifying spam, for those that use askimnet and occasionally check on the spam they receive now and again will recognise the key features of spam more easily, but for the majority that don’t here are some of the key things to look out for:

• A strange author name
• A link to a page that is quite obviously not what you’d want visitors landing on. The key is usually in the link itself
• A long list of links displayed in the comment text
• Or a comment with more than 3 links

Note that it is worth checking the author linking page if it does not look specifically like spam to see if you land on a legitimate site but I’d only ever recommend this to firefox users because of its high safety profile. IE (internet explorer) users beware as IE has a much higher risk of targeting by hackers, viruses, trojans and malware.

(Disclaimer: B2L does not take any responsibility or liabilty for you getting a virus, trojan or malware from spam site nor if you get hacked. Neither does it hold itself responsible or liable for any objectionable content you may see on these sites)

I personally use FF and because of its safe browsing features I will check out the author link to see where my visitors will be landing. I’d hate to lose a visitor to a blam (blogspam) site and if it were to happen to me while browsing another site I’d be quite angry.

Step 2: Translating Your Comment

Here comes the clever part, translating your comment! At B2L I will always take the time to ‘try‘ to translate any legitimate looking comment I receive on my website. This way I can get a rough idea of what the commenter is trying to portray in English and then work on that translation as you will see in shortly in step 3.

What tools are available for translating?

Well you may be thinking that this is going to be pain-staking and hard to decipher or is going to start costing money when in actual fact it is very simple. I use Google Translate [link] to translate any comments on my site into English (I also use it to read page trackback to my blog posts before accepting the trackback).

Google Translate [link] is a brilliant very very easy to use tool. And provides a reasonably good translation which as with all automated translators is not perfect but with a large range of languages its quite invaluable. One of the best features is that not only can you translate blocks of text but you can just place a hyperlink into the bottom bar and hit translate to see a whole site translated into the language of your choice.

Another great feature is that with 100’s of languages working out what language somebody has commented in could take you a lifetime but google has made this incredibly easy. All you need to do is change the setting to “Auto Detect” the language used and google will find that language and translate it.

Just jumping back to the first paragraph on this step you will remember I said ‘try‘ to convert the comment. Google Translate does not offer all the languages of the world (that would be insane) so not all of your comments can be translated but it does offer most of the commonly used and popular languages.

What Can a comment that cannot be translated really benefit your community? We think not in most situations you do with comments that cannot be translated is completely up to you at this point. I personally think that the language must reach such a small minority it many not be worth keeping the comment and most likely delete it.. but again this is completely up to you..

Step 3: Make Sense Of The Comment

Now we all know what kinds of rubbish can be spewed out of any translator and google is not exception. But for the next step of translating your comments I would highly advise that you take just a few minutes to try to make head and tail of what the comment is trying to say.

Read the comment in full before starting any editing. After reading the comment in full take a few minutes to arrange the comment into something that resembles as closely as possible the comment originally written. This way you add a further genuine feel to the comment. Try to avoid over editing comments into your own writing style as this can be way more obvious that you may think and your visitors might think your trying to comment on your own site.

Step 4: Formatting The Comment

So we’ve checked its not spam, we’ve translated deciphered and understood what they are trying to say so how do I present these comments to the rest of my visitors?

The way I choose to represent these comments is to leave the original untranslated text on the comment and to then leave a gap and add the following below “Translated: Hello there..”.

What’s the point in leaving the original comment there?

There are several good reasons to leave the original untranslated comment within your post.

Firstly, by leaving the original comment on the site you maintain the comments originality. The comment will look like its be left by a real visitor and this wont look like you are making up comments in a different language and posting on your site. Along with that it adds character to a post.

Secondly, by leaving the original translation on your post you avoid alienating visitors from that region of the world and it may contribute towards you receiving more visitors (from that region) and further build your websites reach. Also people are far more likely to trust a comment in their own language and from someone from the same country on a website or blog than those commenting in the same language as the blog itself.

Thirdly, closely linked in with my second point is that you improve your international reach as more and more people from that region of the world might start coming to your website.

Example Comment

Here is a quick demo of the set-up explained above. (Its in chinese incase you wanted to check the translation yourself..)

感谢读，我们希望你再次看到你！

Translated: “Thanks for reading we hope you see you again!”

On that note I think your ready to head back and tackle those comments on your own. This brings us almost to the end of our article (for those thinking ‘god does it ever end’).

For those with a short memory span or those just looking for a quicker way to cover what we’ve done here is a quick, and I mean quick, summary of all that listed above.

Quick Summary

Here is a quick run down of what you need to do to cover all the area’s mentioned above:

1. Is it a spam comment? - Check these key points
2. Translate the comment using Google Translate [link]
3. Read the comment and Edit as little as possible to make it understandable
4. Add The Translation Below the original untranslated comment text.

Thanks for reading and we hope this article will go some way to helping you tackle comments in a  different language!

Blog2Life

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