Hacklog: Blogamundo — poking holes in the language barrier since approximately 1 month from now

I posted about the reaction to a translation being posted on Reddit a while back.

Since that post, I ran across a really cool discovery. Reddit is going multilingual:

I’ve been looking forward to announcing this feature ever since we first started drawing up plans for reddit in Steve’s notebook.

Over the months (and as recently as yesterday), we’ve gotten requests for reddits in a number of languages, but subreddits now make this possible (using language codes as subdomains, a la wikipedia). Translating the interface is the next step, but for now, you can read/submit/share links written in your preferred langauge(s) through the english UI.

So now there are Reddits in Chinese (zh.reddit.com), French (fr.reddit.com), German (de.reddit.com), Japanese (ja.reddit.com), Korean (ko.reddit.com), and Spanish (es.reddit.com), and a bunch more. And there’s an open invitation for more suggestions.

The individual Reddits haven’t been localized or promoted very heavily yet, but this I’m really looking forward to seeing if they catch on. For one thing, it’s an interesting way to bootstrap corpora in various languages — it’s easy to get URLs out of feeds.

From our own point of view, these multilingual Reddits offer opportunities for translation: if a particular submission is popular on the Portuguese Reddit, doesn’t it stand to reason that a link to a translation of that submission could be popular on English or Spanish?

Update: Oh, I found the full list of supported languages: Armenian, Basque, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Esperanto, French, German, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish, and Vietnamese.