Still on multilingual blogging, I have recently met (thanks to IRC) Patrick and Luke, who are both interested in the linguistic and multilingual aspect of blogging and have good ideas to contribute.
Luke, in particular, has an proposal for “distributed translation” of blog content by bloggers who typically blog about related topics in a different language and are sufficiently competent translators. For Creative Commons licensed posts there is actually nothing else to implement or code — people could start right away.
As Suw, who blogs in English and Welsh, explains, even in the absence of blogging platforms that specifically support multilingual blogging, Technorati tags or a similar mechanism could serve to “tie together” the different versions of a post, plus related post in whichever language they are written.
Edit: I added the hreflang attribute to the links, like Kevin suggested. Thanks! The indicators of the link languages that appear in pale violet after each link are visible in all browsers that are CSS2 compliant, ie the vast majority of modern browsers, Internet Explorer (any version) being the exception.
Related posts: Merriam-Webster & Firefox, Pseudo-phonetics, Multilingual, multilingue, mehrsprachig, flersproglig, amlieithog, 多言語, Seen elsewhere -- Avibase, Phonetics on the Mac: "Speak After Me", Locali(s|z)ation and internationali(s|z)ation, Meanwhile in France
Technorati (tags): language, multilingualism, outils, tools
Cool, glad you met Pat and Luke!
A suggestion: use rel=”alternate” and hreflang=”en” or “fr” on your links to translations. That is a good way to indicate they are equivalent.