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Xu Jing Lei, the Chinese movie celebrity who regularly gets thousands of comments...
...and hundreds of thousands of page views for each article she writes, is now the most popular blogger in the world, according to blog monitoring service Technorati -- and she's writing in Chinese, not English.
Technorati responded to criticism about its English language bias by blogger Sam Flemming on his "China Word of Mouth" blog.
Xu Jing Lei displaced Boing Boing and Gizmodo, which each have millions of readers. Multilanguage translations will grow exponentially in importance as bloggers join the global conversation. "Machine translations by Google, Babel Fish and others are often laughable," says Sloan Friedman, president of SRF Global Translations, publisher of the Ethics Crisis blog. "Companies need to be prepared to understand what is being said about them by bloggers in any language, and if they're smart, they'll have a certified multilanguage translation service like ours on call.
"Blog swarms happen quickly and they can have a huge impact on a company's business. If you don't have nuanced translations, you can't be sure you'll respond correctly. After all, you can't put out a fire if you don't even see the smoke." (Disclosure: I am a partner in SRF Global.)
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Comments
As Western companies begin to engage more with China, there will be a pressing need for good language skills. When every character has a unique story, every sentence can turn into a minefield. And China is one country where having a good reputation is paramount.
Posted by: Servant of Chaos | 05.06.06
Nice post and great 'global' marketing tactic!
All the best,
Laurel
Posted by: Laurel Delaney | 05.08.06
Gavin: what an absolutely elegant observation. I subscribed to your RSS feed as soon as I saw your second sentence. :>)
BL
Posted by: B.L. Ochman | 05.09.06
Laurel: Thank you very much for the kind words. The Ethics Crisis blog is opening my eyes to global business marketing issues, which are absolutely fascinating.
I got lost for a couple of hours on your sites and on Servant of Chaos, and the sites they led me to.
Gawd, I love blogging. :>)
BL
Posted by: B.L. Ochman | 05.09.06
Not only do companies need to be aware of what is being said about them in other languages, they should be striving to communicate in other languages as well. My blog is now in Korean as well as English, and we occassionally post in Spanish as well. We have a very large Chinese readership (approximately 25%) but every time I ask one of those readers if they would like to see the blog in Chinese as well, they always answer that they prefer it in English because it helps them improve their English. The problem with my "survey," however, is that it does not include the millions of potential Chinese readers who do not speak a word of English.
Posted by: China Law Blog | 05.25.06