Commenting in a Foreign Language

It seems that I’ve been doing it since the Challenge began; today, I should comment on a Portuguese post, for a change! I’ve also added the Google Translation widget and I surely would like to keep a double version of the blog.

How does it feel to engage in such a demanding writing task in a foreign language? I think it depends on how seriously you have studied that language, on your personal sensitiveness and attraction towards certain languages, on how much you value communication with different cultures.

Personally I feel that the fact of reading in English through all the challenge helps me a lot to build my sentences when the moment comes to write a comment or a post; the automated spelling correction is also being precious to me.

Perhaps it turns out to be a very evident solution for small countries: “go global or disappear”. To go global one must think in English; I should add that in my country there is a genuine love for foreign languages and distant cultures besides our economical, political and cultural need to follow the rhythms of History in the noble English language.

I’ve looked for some Spanish blogs that are linked to the Challenge and found in “El Caparazón” that the first Blogging language in the world is Japanese , with 37% of blog posts, shortly followed by English. In a brief delay, Spanish will take the second place…perhaps we will have to learn one more language, yet, to “go completely global.”

In this Blog, I’ve read about web3.0, semantic web, the advent of microblogging versus blogging, Twine – a semantic web tool – all things new to me, but not the Spanish language itself, so near to Portuguese that they became transparent to one another.