Image from Penn State.

One of the best things about the blogosphere is its ability to shrink the planet.

With a simple click, you can discuss writing with someone in London, exchange recipes with someone in India, or brainstorm with someone in Denmark.

The world which used to be of unfathomable size…now fits in your pocket.

One obstacle yet to be overcome, however, is language.

Blog hosts like Blogspot, Tumblr, and our own WordPress, have made it simple for users to create blogs in their native language.

Reading it… not so much.

I have a few bloggers who follow me here on my author blog and several who follow Nesie’s Place, whose blogs I am unable to read. I can stumble through Spanish and French, after that…I’m a deer caught in the headlights!

On a good day…if I’m on my cell, ye olde translator kicks in and automatically translates the page. Unfortunately, that does not always happen. I used my cell earlier today to visit a blog I think was Lithuanian. The translator kicks in, and I’m waiting…and waiting, when suddenly the translator posts the error message, “Unable to translate; no translation found.” It then not only closes itself – something it’s never done before – it also closes the browser!

Attempting to translate another blog from Urdu to English, I cut and pasted a paragraph into a window on freetranslation.com and was given a translation of the “blogger had taken his foot for a walk in the park and thrown his dog around.”

Can’t be sure…but I don’t think that’s correct.

It would be nice to be able to do more than visit these blogs and simply leave a like. That’s the lazy way. Better to be able to translate the page and comment accordingly. What if the blogger is advocating for the burning of all coffee plantations or the banning of books, and I casually pop in and leave a like?

That would not be good.

It would be great if blogs could auto-translate…and maybe they can. I’m just not aware of how to access the feature.

If you know of a one-size-fits-most app or add-in that will allow successful language translation, please share it in the comments below. I’m sure I’m not the only one with this issue.

Not this time anyway.