Non English Readers

Non English Readers

Non English Readers
Non-English readers write me letters, they post comments on blogs, and they submit their webpages to HoboTraveler.com and HoboHideOut.com. I delete many, and cannot reply to most.

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Manila, Philippines - Quezon City Southeast Asia
Sunday, December 9, 2007
Andy of HoboTraveler.com --- Submit Hotel URL
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My site is about 50 / 50, about 50 percent of readers are native English Speakers and the rest are not. Communication with a person who does not speak English is a 50/50 proposition, I have a reasonable responsibility to write clear, simple words and help them listen or read. They have a responsibility to try to understand.

I speak Spanish, and when I traveled to Brazil, people would ask,
- Does Spanish help?-
- Yes, if the person you are talking with wants to understand. -

I have been toying around with the idea of having machine translations more easily available on the page. A click here and translate from English to Spanish, Japanese, etc.

I sometimes am wildly amazed how culturally and language insensitive the big corporate sites can be. I am also amazed how companies like Google.com and Yahoo.com can be very sensitive.

China wants to do business, they submit pages to my HoboTraveler.com, import - export pages continually. People want visas to go work, India is continually submitting to my Embassy pages.

I delete about 50 percent because they do not understand and are off topic, more or less they submit in the wrong category most of the time.

If a person from another language group writes badly, miss-spells words, etc, I am very forgiving. If they use abbreviations used in chats, like coz or b4, or lol, I just delete and do not worry, they are not focused. They are learning the wrong habits, chat language is not English, and for sure is not well mannered.

It is a fun experience with the site to learn how the rest of the world thinks. In then end, I can see their intentions, and the ones that are not lazy, do a good job will make it where they want to go.

Non English Readers