Companies Need to Monitor Foreign Language Blogs -- Or Else

By B.L. Ochman Xu Jing Lei, the Chinese movie celebrity who regularly gets thousands of comments and hundreds of thousands of page views for each article she writes, is now the most popular blogger in the world, according to blog monitoring service Technorati -- and she's writing in Chinese, not English.

Technorati responded to criticism about its English language bias by blogger Sam Flemming on his "China Word of Mouth" blog.

Xu Jing Lei displaced Boing Boing and Gizmodo, which each have millions of readers. Multilanguage translations will grow exponentially in importance as bloggers join the global conversation.

"Machine translations by Google, Babel Fish and others are often laughable," says Sloan Friedman, president of SRF Global Translations, publisher of the Ethics Crisis blog. "Companies need to be prepared to understand what is being said about them by bloggers in any language, and if they're smart, they'll have a certified multilanguage translation service like ours on call."

"Blog swarms happen quickly and they can have a huge impact on a company's business. If you don't have nuanced translations, you can't be sure you'll respond correctly. After all, you can't put out a fire if you don't even see the smoke."

My question is what is the point of having an English version of a Chinese blog when your target audience is Chinese people?