How should i reply?

ChatIndia

Community Advocate
Community Support
Messages
1,408
Reaction score
30
Points
48
Hello,
I asked for volunteer content writers for my new upcoming blog on another forum and i got 4 people interested in it. one is from USA and three of them are from India.

Though i can reply those three Indian people in Hindi but in this diversified country everybody doesn't know Hindi and the person from America obviously don't know Hindi. Besides I have never ever replied to someone interested to write voluntarily.

so how should i reply to the post:

I'm interested. PM me and sign me up please. I'm starting a software/web development company so I'm sure I'll be able to provide a lot of good content for this theme.
 

essellar

Community Advocate
Community Support
Messages
3,295
Reaction score
227
Points
63
Even trying to be "merely" pan-Indic is going to be a problem (as you probably understand better than most of us do). You not only have a large number of individual languages to consider, you have two entirely different conceptions of language (Indo-European and Dravidian), and even if you stick to the Indo-European languages of India, you can't even count on Devenagari. So you have a couple of choices:

1) you can accept content directly for publication, but absolutely require that it be in well-written Hindi;

2) you can accept content indirectly from anyone who can give you content in a language you can easily translate from and communicate in, and communicate with the contributor in whatever language you are both conversant with; or

3) you can make the site bilingual or multilingual.

Option 1 is the easiest, but it's also the most restrictive. Sure, there are a lot of people who have a good working knowledge of Hindi, but the problem with being monolingual is that there's a danger of it becoming entirely monocultural and incestuous. To some extent, any web community is a sort of "echo chamber", but there's a better chance of bringing new ideas for consideration into the mix if you're not locked into a smallish linguistic and geographical community. (And sure, I know that there is, for instance, a relatively large Hindi-speaking community here in Toronto and in other "foreign" cities, but the generation that has a real competence in Hindi is still largely rooted in the culture and values of their homeland. The second generation, or those who have been here since childhood, would be submitting stuff that's as much in need of "translation" as a foreign-language submission.)

Option 2 is obviously going to require a lot more work, but at the same time it can open your blog to a lot more high-quality content, particularly if that "second language" is English. It's not that the English-speaking world has a monopoly on wisdom or any such thing (although it may appear that we sometimes do think that way), but that English (or a broken variant thereof) has managed to become a sort of lingua franca in which people from many different regions and cultures can communicate.

Don't worry that you might need to change the submitted content a bit to make it understandable in Hindi -- every language has its own idiomatic way of expressing things, and it's the mark of a good translator to be able to bridge those semiotic chasms. You should probably make your contributors aware that what appears on your site won't always be a word-for-word translation of what they submitted. It may be a good idea, as well, to engage in a bit of back-and-forth on some of the more difficult idiomatic substitutions -- you may not be able to capture the exact sense of the original, but there may be one alternative that comes closer to the author's intent than any of the others.

Option 3 might sound like a good idea, but there's a chance that Hindi (or more generalized Indian if the aim is to be pan-Indic) might get pushed aside, leaving only the menus and other "chrome" elements behind as evidence of the original site. It may upset the original authors to have their content appear in a form that they can't read, but that's something you'll need to straighten out from the beginning. You can't abandon your audience for the sake of your contributors.

My suggestion would be to go with Option 2 -- accept content from wherever you can get it, but make it available to your audience in clear, fluent, idiomatic Hindi. Come to a licensing agreement with your contributors that allows them to publish the same material elsewhere in the original language if you don't have an alternate-language version of your site. Agree to discuss the more difficult aspects of translation so that you're not putting words in the author's mouth. That will work best for both you and your authors -- your site becomes as useful as it can be to your target audience, and your authors get their original content published as it was meant to be in more than one language. (There is a lot of my content out there on the web that's been scraped and put through, I think, Babelfish and makes less sense than a random word list might have -- and since it pertains to programming enterprise-level software, I hate to think of the damage that was done by following "my advice".)
 

vv.bbcc19

Community Advocate
Community Support
Messages
1,524
Reaction score
92
Points
48
Hello,
I asked for volunteer content writers for my new upcoming blog on another forum and i got 4 people interested in it. one is from USA and three of them are from India.

Though i can reply those three Indian people in Hindi but in this diversified country everybody doesn't know Hindi and the person from America obviously don't know Hindi. Besides I have never ever replied to someone interested to write voluntarily.

so how should i reply to the post:
I think you can wait for a while until you get more.
Also most people in India can communicate in English.
This is a gut feeling.I think you can call/write to those three people and know from them if they can get back the blog posts in English..
 

essellar

Community Advocate
Community Support
Messages
3,295
Reaction score
227
Points
63
Perhaps most people in India can make themselves understood (eventually) in English, and can extract the gist of the meaning, but let's be realistic. The variety of competence in English in India ranges from the excellent to the execrable. I've known people who I couldn't tell from native speakers of "Received Pronunciation" British English, and many more who only give away their ethnicity by intonation (and, perhaps, a certain queerness about the Ws and Rs). At the same time, I've known and worked with a far greater number of people whose English is distinctly a second language -- it's not that it's horrible, but it's obviously a chore. And here in Canada, I meet people every day who are still far more comfortable (and more eloquent) in their home language even after decades of full immersion in an English world (or French, if they happen to be in Quebec).

Why shouldn't people be able to read interesting content in the same language they use to think, whether that be Hindi, Punjabi, Gujarati, Tamil or what have you? There are more than enough English-language sites on the web already (not that I want the web to stop growing), but there aren't nearly as many good sites in other languages. Exploring new ideas, learning new things -- even getting the joke -- is hard enough. Why force a mental translation at the same time?

Look, it's not that I (and people like me) want to keep you down, keep you from becoming fluent in the magical language of power and influence. That world is still available at the click of a mouse. But don't you think there might be one or two, or maybe a few tens of millions of people who just want to relax and read a good blog now and then?
 

essellar

Community Advocate
Community Support
Messages
3,295
Reaction score
227
Points
63
By the way, ChatIndia (or anybody else, for that matter), if anything I've said in this thread can help you with your contributors or would make a good addition to a "why this language" FAQ on your web site, I hereby release my writings in this thread above (linked as entry #2 and #4) under the provisions of the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal license. Since Canadian copyright law prohibits voluntary alienation of a creator's rights in a work, I cannot actually put the text into the public domain -- but that license gives you the right to copy, adapt, translate and publish the work in any form without attribution or consideration (payment) of any kind. x10Hosting's rights in the work, as publisher, may still apply; I can only hope that they recognise my intent and grant an equivalent license for the work.
 
Top