To the English Speaking Developer Community Members Stumbling Across My Blog

Today I have received a number of requests from developers who asked me to post English Web Log messages.

As much as I feel flattered by the interest in my postings and of course would like to comply with the repeated request, I feel, on the other hand, I should not. For one simple reason: my target audience is the German or German-speaking developer community.

I´m living in Germany, I´m working in Germany, Germany (or the German-speaking regions: Germany, Austria, Switzerland) is the third (or even second?) largest software market, and I´m not very eager to increase my travelling abroad much for consulting/speaking engagements.

So let me apologize to all you English speaking developers: I can empathize with you, and I will reevaluate my standpoint in a couple of months (if I manage to keep on blogging for that long).

But for now I feel I serve my target audience much better by providing them information in their own language. Knowing the German developer community from many events for many years I simply know, although they might be able to read English technical literature, they very much prefer to read in German. That´s why I´m blogging in German.

I full well understand, this will limit the reach of "my message", but I´m willing to suffer the consequences. As you might guess, I´m constantly weighing the pros and cons. Let´s see, what I´ll be thinking in a couple of months. Stay tuned...

3 Comments

  • Sounds like a good plan. At techedbloggers.net, I'm going to provide links to babelfish.altavista.com for translation to English (and maybe other languages eventually)- babelfish translation is far from perfect, but the reader can pick up the gist of a post. This way we can still include non-English posts in the aggregate feed.





    I'd like to see more aggregated blogs provide language translation facilities. Wouldn't it be cool to filter an RSS feed through a translation web service before receiving it in your aggregator!?





    If you know of any other language translation services that are free and do a better job than babelfish, please let me know.


  • Well, every blog posted on weblogs.asp.net is also available in the main fead, which is read by many people. If your own blog is in german, french or whatever, I don't think anyone would care, except for the fact that the material posted can be interesting but can now not be understood. However a german blog on weblogs.asp.net is entered also in the mainfeed, and you can't filter there, but the feed is available on a LOT of sites who mirror the main feed headlines. Therefor it's probably more wise to blog in english, so your audience is MUCH larger than it is now, plus people who are interested can understand your work, which is a good thing, not? :) You can of course always supply a german translation in a linked story.

  • So now I´m posting a comment to my own posting? Hm... :-) But, well, it seems to be necessary. To dispell maybe some misunderstandings:





    I´m posting in German although I myself do understand English and am obviously able to write in English. Also my target audience to a large extend does read English. But: As a courtesy to my target audience and because they like to read German even more then English, I´m providing my information in German.





    I do not aim to inform the world developer community. As I said, I´m fully aware of the somewhat limited range of German web log postings.





    Even though there seems to be a large world community of bloggers I don´t see an inherent neccessity in using English as a web log language.





    Also I don´t think it is impolite to have a web log in one´s native language.





    If my blogging in German appears on the main feed and is annoying to anybody, I apologize. I did not choose to be included in the main feed and am not interested in it for the moment. If there was an option to exclude my web log from the main feed, I´d surely check it.

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