Three years and a few days ago, I got a strange email from Blogger Support:
You have helped us out tremendously with your Blogger expertise, personal knowledge base and help articles, and support for the members of the Help Group. We really do appreciate what you do - as does everyone in the group!
And that is where the Blog*Star program started for me. For those of you who've never been to the Blogger Help Forum, we Blog*Stars are the ones working with the Blogger Team to investigate and answer your questions.
It's been a strange, and wonderful, 3 years. Both Jordan and now currently Gatsby (aka Brett outside of the forum world) have been great contacts for us, and have provided major assets to the Blog*Star program.
Blogger Is Part Of A World Community
And that's one thing that excites me tremenduously. Here we have the people of the world, communicating directly with other people of the world. But along with the excitement from the communication, we get a challenge.
I'm a citizen of the USA, and I speak English, as do most of the readers of my blogs. But, not everybody in the world community speaks English. The English language not only doesn't have a majority in the community, it's not even the single most commonly spoken language. WikiPedia shows English in 4th place, behind Mandarin Chinese, Hindu / Urdu, and Spanish.
If I'm going to reach out into the world, I have to speak other languages in my blogs.
Almost two years ago, I started doing just that, when I had an immediate need to make my post Phishing Attack Warning Messages From Kaspersky Internet Security available in Russian. I found a publicly available front end for the Google Translator, enhanced the front end design, and published it as my Cumulus Translator Bar.
Working with Roberto of RobertosBlogs Dot Net, we now have a translator bar that uses the Google Translator, and supports any of 54 world languages:
If you want this translator bar in your blog, click here to see how it's done. And that's the beginning.
This week, we take a new direction, to Cumulus In Your Language. We're starting, with a "French to 54 Languages" translator bar. The "French to 54 Languages" capability is being tested in a blog that is published in French; if you have a blog that's published en Francais, you might want to try it out.
We're hoping to have additional languages available shortly, and as you read this are currently developing the next iteration.
If you need help with your Blogger blog, I'll see you in the forums. Feel free to check out my blog, at http://blogging.nitecruzr.net/.
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