As I’m writing this, Stamp Collecting Blog is about to break the limit of 1,000 approved user responses / comments. I’d like to thank all the readers of the blog for this great achievement. Without your contributions this blog would be much more boring (and I would have a lot more unanswered questions).

The second issue I want to share with You readers is the question of making the blog content multi-lingual.  Denis wrote a question about the topic earlier today (asking if it would be OK to to translate and publish some of the articles at his own site),  and I did reply him. But I’d surely like to hear more opinions about this . And yes, I do want to hear YOUR opinion.

Below is my response to Denis:

I have considered translating some of the articles to major languages (russian, german, spanish, france etc) a long time. And I have even tested up some “auto-translation” tools – but they appear to provide somewhat poor results (yes, the page content has been somewhat understandable, but grammar-wise they have been intolerable).

As your suggestion…If You (or anybody else for that matter)wishes to translate some of the blog content to their first (native) language, then I’d suggest that the content, both original and ANY translated versions, would be hosted here at stampcollectingblog.com (for example stampcollectingblog.com/ru/which-of-these-stamps-went-up-in-value.php would contain Russian version of this page). The translated entries could be sent to me (by email, by file upload or some other means), and then I’d simply put them into proper place.

I can’t / won’t provide money for any of the translations, but proper credit’s (name and possibly a link back to translator webpage if such exists) for the hard work would be always put in their place… And very likely it would become a very wiki-like system, where (at least in theory) anyone could contribute to translation work.

How do you think about my counter-proposal?

The reason I’m giving this topic more “visibility” is because I want to find out how many of you would be willing to contribute their time/energy to translating any of the blog’s pages to their native language?

And how many of you do feel it would be useful? The blog has readers from all corners of the world (see below image), but I fear most of them are “silent”  (due to language barrier). Possibly seeing some of the available content in their own language / character set would break down some inter-cultural walls.

Stamp Collecting Blog readers come from all corners of the world. Majority of readers come from U.S. , U.K and Canada., but blog does have hundreds of of casual readers in far and away countries.

But… How do you folks feel about making the blog multi-lingual?   Share your thoughts with me, please.

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