For everyone who has asked for it -oh well, just little Doki who was the one who suggested me this as he is an experienced blogger- I have launched this blog english version , that will be the one to load by “default”. The spanish version will be at an internal directory named “espanol” and will be accessible through an option that invites spanish speakers to enter.

Different blog language versions¿Why did I do this? Simple: a lot -if not the majority- of the time, now that I am blogging, I come up with post ideas and the almost all the references and documentation (and the articles that I want to link to) are in english… so I had the need to have a version in this language.

On the other hand, it is always good to have “an opened door” for possible non-spanish speakers visitors, because the articles that I am planning to publish could be of interest for international visitors and is not going to be only focused on spanish or hispanic related topics. As I am fluent in English I can update the blog in both languages without much effort, so for me it is very feasible to have an english and a spanish version.

However this type of decisions are not easy to take when you have a commercial, product, service or company blog, where the changes have more consequences and represent more costs.

That is why I have made the following “language internationalization” guideline for blogs:

 

  1. To Identify: Identify your target market: What sector do you want to target with your blog? What languages do your visitors speak? Where do your visitors come from? To get this information you can search for Internet market studies, study your blog’s analytics data, analyze your RSS subscribers and what your competition is doing online. Depending on the results you get you will know if it is worthwhile to implement your blog in another language.
  2. To Evaluate: If you have identified that the majority or a good part of your target market is abroad and speak another language you will need to evaluate if you have the capability to translate your blog to that language, the time that this will take, the related costs (if someone else has to translate it) or if it is more feasible to translate it to English, the most “international” language that could be useful if you want to reach multiple markets at once.
  3. To Plan: You will need to plan the type of integration that you will do with the existing blog version: Is the blog going to be hosted in an internal directory inside the current domain or is it going to be in a new domain with the blog name in the new language? All will depend on your online brand strategy and additional Internet marketing factors, for example, if you create the new blog version in your current domain you can name the directory where it will be hosted in a highly relevant, descriptive way and you will be able to have a unique structure that could be easier to manage and that will inherit SEO “force” as it is going to be in an old domain with authority.
  4. To choose: Research what is the best technical option to implement the new blog according to the planned integration. For example, if you wish to implement the new blog version with the help of some available plugins as polyglot, language picker, gengo, etc. or if you want to install a new blog system maintaining two independent structures.
  5. To Implement: Once you have chosen the best implementation option it is time to install and update, but be careful, make backups of the files and the database. Remember that you will need to translate the blog’s user interface elements, link the two versions to give the option to switch from one to the other and add an additional RSS feed for the new language.

After having seen the different criteria that you can take into account to make a decision: Do you think that it is convenient to internationalize your blog?… What are the other factors that you think can additionally influence bloggers to make this decision?

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