Localizing my personal blog. An experiment.

Several years ago when I began to blog for the first time, I didn't know anything about localization or search engine optimization (SEO). Now I find myself thinking often about both and more often about the relationship between them. As I began to learn about localization and the idea for this blog started to materialize, I decided that I should find a way to localize it. This would also give me a chance to better understand international search and SEO.

But what to do? I only speak two languages, and the idea of hiring someone to translate my content is preposterous, considering my financial situation as a poor student. With some of my newly obtained knowledge, I set out to find an internationalized template for my blog. Fortunately, this was not too difficult. Next, I miraculously came upon the GTS Translation plugin for WordPress. Recognizing the limitations of machine and community translation, I'm pleased to say that an internationalized template and the GTS Plugin have allowed me to produce a blog in five languages.

Here are some ideas I'd like to try as I continue this experiment:

• Develop a set of quality metrics and ask native speakers of each GTS Plugin language to review and rate content quality.
• Search for my blog on Google's country sites. Identify key words in other languages.
• Search for a correlation between translated content and the countries from which people find my site. Do people in France read it in French, for example?
• Modify my writing style. Does a more generic style produce better translations? Are slightly better machine translations worth sacrificing my writing voice in English?

Eventually, I will take a website localization class. Until then, I will learn all that I can on my own, and I believe this experience will give me a unique perspective as I participate in that class.