The Birth of Linguistic Diversity on steemit.

in #languages8 years ago (edited)

Can you imagine the explosive growth linguistic diversity can cause for the steemit platform?

We will be exposed to even more diverse, informative and interesting content if we can get all authors, from different countries, on all the continents, contributing actively using their native language on steemit, with English translations added.

This will make everyone feel more part of a family and at home, forming their own groups.

This platform will become less daunting for non-English speakers.

The effect linguistic diversity can have on this platform.

Here are the basic stats on Linguistic Diversity we can get from 4 continents alone.

  1. Africa – In Africa there are about 1 250-3 000 languages spoken.
    A) South Africa – 11 official languages.
    Afrikaans, English, IsiNdebele, IsiXhosa, IsiZulu, Sesotho sa Leboa, Sesotho, Setswana, siSwati, Tshivenda, Xitsonga.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Africa
  2. Asia – 2 269 languages
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Nepal
  3. Europe – 24 Official languages
    Bulgarian, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Finish, French, German, Greek, Hungarian, Irish, Italian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Europe
  4. Ociania – The 3 major groups: Malay, Tagalog, Polynesian
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_Oceania

Conclusion:

As we see we have huge problems with plagiarism on steemit. The plague of plagiarized articles is sticking out its nasty head more often, are mostly driven by financial reward and greed.

So what will be the solution other than a number of people scanning daily for plagiarized material?
Do we write our articles in English, the worlds Universal Language or our Native Tongue?

"Poor English" can mask plagiarism. Perhaps the solution is linguistic diversity.

Hence we now have a thriving Russian community, Spannish and Portuguese are in the works. Chinese and other Asian languages appear from time to time and I have seen the odd bit of French.

I would encourage non-English first language speakers to do whatever you can to promote your own native languages… find each other by posting dual language posts, co-operate and grow your communities.

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I agree gavvet, I did an article on this about a month ago that you can feel free to check out if you want, but the gist of what I was saying is we need to better capture the international market with other sites that are translated but have the same usability and interfaces as steemit.com. So for example we could have a ru.steemit.com or a jp.steemit.com and if you are multilingual you can choose to see the posts from multiple sites. That would be a cool idea imo.

Can't wait for that day... In fact working on exactly that... watch this space

@calaber24p - having sister sites catering to specific languages is a brilliant idea! It's hard enough making sure the English language ones are plagiarism-free. And being tied into digital currency, I don't think anyone from other countries would cry foul about their SD value because it would remain the same.

The spanish speakers comunity is growing but i think that there is no much incentive because we have just some dolphins, will be hard for non-english speakers to be good rewarded at this moment.

Do not give up, try write more... I also non English speaker. I know how hard to write in English language, also it's hard to promote article in our first language, but just do it and go on. Nice ! :)

Yes my friend i will never give up.

Just in time too! Since my writing doesn't seem to be gaining visibility yet, for the last week most I've been doing are the translations, and the offer to translate I made right after joining. That doesn't bring much money, but after each article the number of my followers grows a little bit. Besides reading the translations at the time made my eyes bleed. Hopefully we'll be able to get more gold translators, which will improve the cohesion between different language segments. :-)
For that I am doing my part by participating in translation of articles (with authors permissions, of course) into Russian for @rusteemitblog, because a lot of people in the Russian speaking community miss the news as their knowledge of English is really lacking. We could use some support, since the translators are doing pro bono work right now, with little or no compensation.

Here are people from around the world, and not surprisingly because here interestingly, it is possible much what new to know, and a scale will broaden and it is good) In fact in Steemite it is possible to earn it gives a large plus to visited"!!!)) Author good job "

Like the idea, spanish can probably make the biggest headway being it is essentially the second language in America.
@oecp85 does make a good point about all the whales though. However, if one takes the lead in a specific language, they will become the authority and the sheer mass of the group will make it worth it.

Exactly... first mover advantage applies to communities as well

I am a native Italian speaker. Publishing in your native language on Steemit at the moments is a bit of a chicken and egg game. ..people feel their language community is too small for their post to have an impact. ..but the community will hardly grow unless we publish more posts in our language and then share them on Facebook, etc. @gavvet : would you like to help us, perhaps by featuring a few Italian authors soon? Personally, I would be interested, but I would also be glad to introduce you to other Italian authors..

Italian would be great... I would need someone to check the originality like @terrycraft did for me with the Russians when we got that started

Cool. Then I'll contact you through the chat :-)

Nice and interesting article about linguistics !
I hope you all have a great day, greetings from Germany ;)

Guten dag to you too...

Hi!
Thanks for adressing that! I've been active in the establishment of https://steemit.com/trending/deutsch for quite a while now! It is very important for native speakers to actually start providing good content in their respective languages and not to wait for others to start, instead of posting english only. That is unfortunately very widespread herd behavior.

Why there are no Russian-language words in you intro image?

You mentioned this language in the text and tags but not on intro.

you can check in my blog... plenty Russian... unfortunately this is the only free to use image that seemed relevant when I was looking

Там многих языков нет, это же не повод оскорбляться.

@gavvet is your solution to have us post in our own language and translate into english as well? Where do we tag it as? #spanish? Do we do our title both in our language and english?

This will require more on our part, especially if we write long posts. How can our work be recognized? Could we start a new tag #duallanguage maybe or something to that extent? I am really interested, please let me know :)

I like the suggestion... reach out to @anwenbaumeister for spannish

Ok thanks. Will try reaching @anwenbaumeister

super nice :) good job

I would love to do Hidden Gems in Filipino and Promote Filipino writers but where I should start? I don't even know if we are more than 10 here in steemit. :(

Be patient... give it time

How is the problem of non-english tags usually solved? English post about cats would be tagged 'cats', language X version of the tag, for example, 'xyzab', is there something like 'show me posts about cats in X language'? Or would I need to know what the tag in X is? Well, if I wanted to read posts in X I would probably know already what the X word is, but... :)

I love the idea of poor English as a plagiarism mask....Hahaha
However it is definitely beauty in diversity

we're trying, posts barely get noticed.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot as well, and may have an idea to help bridge the gap temporarily... I messaged you in chat to get some additional input.

I have to admit I was excited about seeing posts in Korean even though I've forgotten how to read and speak the language of my youth. (I'm an Army brat with a Korean mom)
But you make an excellent point about plagiarism and I kind of wish the devs would somehow implement an autorun of post content through Copyscape or the like. If 10% or more of the content is copied, the post gets a warning message and the POST button becomes inaccessible. It would keep plagiarized material off the blockchain IMHO.

Nice idea. I can't do much with translation, but would be interested in playing a role as an editor. Many of the translated works we're seeing could use some help in that area.

What matters is that you have readers, no matter the language. I am fluent English and French native. I can understand that is not the case with everyone. i actually have a story I am supposed to write in different languages. Yo hablo un poquito de espagnol tambien. Bonne journée

@gavvet You have brought to the forefront a very good point and I have also been encouraging others to post in their mother tongue.

I'm sorry I only saw this today but interestingly I was linked through to your article by a post in the Italian section of Steemit Chat. The future will be even brighter with multi languages!

@kus-knee (The Old Dog)

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Interesting
I'm following you now