IndieWeb Carnival - Multilingualism in a global web

This month’s IndieWeb Carnival is hosted by Riccardo with the theme multilingualism in a global web.

I personally experience the web happens in two languages, Brazilian Portuguese my home tongue and English the language I’ve chosen for most of the writing and reading I do online.

When I started this blog, over 20 years ago now, I was writing in Portuguese but later I decide to write in English and never looked back. However more recently I started a new blog to share in Portuguese things that interests me that are not always easy to find information about in Portuguese such as the IndieWeb and Open Web standards. I am doing this in the hopes to share the knowledge with those whom speak Portuguese but don’t have proficiency in a foreign language like English.

And that brings me to what I want to talk about on this theme of multilingualism. Since the web is most written in English, a lot of the knowledge only exists in English. So for people that speaks English and another language they have the change to help others by transferring what they learned in the English written and spoken world to the other languages and help those who doesn’t speak English.

On a similar matter, but the other way around is also something a polyglot can help. I just recently watched this video from a live event organized by the Internet Archive and around the 56 minutes mark a woman named Rosie Stephenson-Goodknight came into stage and shared with the audience almond other things the work she does translating Wikipedia pages from other languages into English. She is able to do that because she is a polyglot and she is very diligent with the work that she does, verifying references to fact check the contents on Wikipedia. This is pure knowledge sharing using a medium like Wikipedia that can have a huge impact in our society.

I remember something I heard once about making the web more accessible for vision and hearing impairing people that I believe is also applicable in this context on multilingualism on the web. By not including those who rely on accessibility content you are depriving society of the contribution they can make. In a similar vein withholding the knowledge from those who don’t speak English we are depriving ourselves of their contributions.

Definitely something to think about.

Thank you Riccardo for hosting such a interesting topic.