Bilingual publishing

By Filip Salomonsson; published on December 05, 2006.

One of the things I'm not sure how to handle here is the separation, or non-separation, of blog posts in different languages. I'm at least fairly comfortable writing in English, but there is no tongue like your mother tongue, and some things will simply have to be in Swedish.

I see a number of possible ways to deal with that. Here are a few:

  • Separate them entirely. One blog for Swedish, and one for English, with separate feeds. There can then be a separate place where they're both intertwined, leaving me with, at least, three publishing points.
  • Mix'em up! All-in-one blog and feed. No separation at all. English-only readers will have to cope with the occational Swedish muppet cookery.
  • Mix'em up, but offer separate feeds. Nice option, but I don't like the idea of multiple feeds. I want to keep using FeedBurner, and I don't want to have to look in several places for statistics, etc.

I'm leaning towards the simple mix. Just as you can skip over a post that doesn't strike your fancy, you can surely skip over the occational post in a language you don't know.

Posts will have their language specified in the feed, though, so feed readers surely could filter out stuff the user doesn't want, based on that information. I don't know of any feed reader that does, but I'm not sure that's my problem.

(Are there any feed readers that actively support the Accept-Language HTTP request header? If there were, and FeedBurner supported that (perhaps with a lang=xx url parameter or something similar as a backup solution), that would be awesome.)