More shameless remarks by Larko

Linking in a foreign language

It turns out that I have unintentionally managed to cause some confusion by doing something as innocent as linking to a blog. The confusion was based on the fact that I was linking from a post written in Finnish to a post written in German. My Finnish post was in one of my blogs that is specialized on topics around work and the linked blog was in Udo Vetter’s law blog.

Mr. Vetter wrote a short post about somebody who was on a sick leave but was nevertheless summoned by his employer to appear in the office for a career prospect discussion. He had a clause in his contract that banned use of alcohol during working hours. When the man appeared for the discussion, two persons showed up and breathalized him. He was subsequently fired because the breath test showed 0,2 promille of alcohol in his blood.

The topic of alcohol and employment is interesting per se. In this case it appeared that the career discussion was used as an excuse to get rid of the employee which also made it interesting in context of a work related blog. So I wrote a summary (not a word for word translation) of the original post and linked to it.

Udo Vetter wrote yesterday that he had a funny trackback of which he understood just one word: alcohol. This prompted a number of comments both in his blog and mine. One of them, written by Jossi, even managed to reproduce a translation back to German that essentially matches with the original post.

An anonymous comment in my blog asks me this question:

Did it ever occur to you that setting trackbacks to foreign-language blogs might be considered impolite if you don’t provide a translation of your entry in the other blog’s language and/or English?

That is indeed an interesting question. In this particular case it would have practically meant that I had to copy and paste the original post to my blog which I did not think was a good idea as I was linking to it. How polite would that have been?

I do usually make a post in my English blog when linking to a blog in a language other than that of the blog. I do not remember why I failed to post this one in English. The time stamp of my post shows that it was written at 3.47 a.m. local time which would suggest that I might have gone to bed right after posting.

Baring in mind that I currently blog in four languages and could write up to 20 posts on a busy day, I sometimes do not even remember which topic I have covered in which blog. But the general rule is that I make a post in English of whatever I find in German blogs. By the way, those are a good source of interesting material.

But the question remains: is it impolite to link in a foreign language? I sometimes get linked to in a language that I do not even recognize, much less understand. I have mostly managed to somehow figure out what they post about but it is not such a big deal for me. If somebody thinks that I have written something that is worth refering to, I have nothing against that it is shared to people who do not understand the language I was blogging in.

I have also seen lots of posts in German blogs refering and linking to something that was written in another language, mostly English. But I have never seen a post reproduced in English. Which brings up the question if there are not two different standards of politeness.

English is of course the universal language of the Internet but it would be a shame if the web was all English. That would eventually mean that the smaller languages would die out. Of the European languages, German, French, Spanish and Italian are big enough to survive but langauges like Finnish and Estonian would be reduced to something only spoken on Sundays if there was no web content in those languages. But the smaller nations also need to interact with others which is why it is necessary to refer to web material in other languages.