Yes the emphasis is on self-translation by the authors. If you go to the Russian language you will notice quite a few I did. Authors can also choose to make a posting in their own language and not provide any English version at all (or as a translation). This hasn’t happened too much though.

We didn’t want automatic translation as the quality is still quite poor. This is especially the case for non-European languages.

I’ve got no doubt things will get there eventually but we’re not quite there yet. :)

Interesting to hear how you guys are doing it. Do all of your contributors translate their own content or are there a handful of you who share that duty?

One of the challenges I see facing the blogging (and other user-distributed information models) is breaking free of the restrictions of their native tongue.

For example English is essentially my only language. I can understand and read some french but Machine Translation would probably put out something more legible than I could.

Does your model account for contributors like that or is the onus on the authors to self-translate?

We built Multilingual Search actually (e3internet) and I’m also one of the editor for Russia. Good to see Andy, our Managing Editor here as well!
I thought I’d just give you the technical run down as I think we came pretty close to completing your challenge.

The MLS platform lets the editors post in any language they choose. Each extra language translation is added to the parent blog post. You can see some of my Russian posts by searching on the right (ru). RSS, as Andy wrote, can be selected by country and language. When you select a language you will only view those posts.

The only part we didn’t work on was changing the interface to suit the language chosen. We did look at that but decided it would have got a little confusing for our users. That may be something we look at in the future. Key to our platform though was that the editors themselves could blog in whichever language they chose, we did not have any automatic translation running.

Of course this then places more work on the editors to provide those translations! This is a unique aspect though of Multilingual Search and something we want to expand upon.

Thanks for your interest in the project.

Thanks for the clarifications about your site – glad to see the Bulgarian “issue” was just a bug, I’ll include a note in the original post to indicate that.

My one bit of feedback message wise is I got the reverse impression of your site’s intention from everything I read about it. The bringing non-English search engine news to the English market doesn’t come across.

Thanks for stopping by – it seems you guys are still in the midst of setting up and getting your site off the ground, I’ll defenitely be sure to check back periodically.

- Ryan

However, we have today added a cool feature – RSS feeds by country and language.

It won’t function properly until our team of bloggers have produced more in the way of non-English posts – but that’s where we’re going.

This means – not now but later – web site owners will be able to plug in a news feed from us in Bulgarian, Russian, French of any other languages. It has to be said thought that we will always have more English on the site than local languages.

And the Bulgarian thing was a bug which we have hopefully now fixed. :)

- Ryan