Solving the bilingual problem for Twitter
by Hilke on Apr.11, 2009, under English
Some time ago I talked about the problem of speaking two languages on social platforms such as Twitter or Facebook.
Many of us Dutch-speaking social media users have to deal with a situation where we express ourselves much better in our native tongue, but we also have a bunch of international followers and we don’t want to overload them with messages in a language which they can’t understand.
I think I found a humble solution for this problem on the Twitter platform. I registered an account on Twitter, @nlds, which is short for ‘Nederlands’ (Dutch). This is the deal:
Of course, this only works if all my Dutch-speaking followers start to follow @nlds. I’ll start tweeting about that and I hope everybody will like my idea (and retweet it).
It’s quite clear that this system can also be applied to other languages. Just look for a straightforward and short twittername. Or maybe Twitter itself should take care of this?
7 Comments for this entry
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Welcome!
I am a musician myself, and I really got interested in all that internet stuff. This blog is here to give you some help about designing your online strategy as a band or artist.
April 24th, 2009 on 11:55
no offence but the @nlds url directs me to @ndls.
Who’s someone else
April 24th, 2009 on 13:12
Oh, sorry, stupid mistake. Thanks for pointing my out! I corrected it
April 24th, 2009 on 13:35
You lost me at
“Only people who follow @nlds will receive the message in their stream, because this is technically a reply to @nlds”
May 13th, 2009 on 09:11
Today’s fuzz about #fixreplies makes clear my point again. If I put @nlds in my tweet, you will not receive it if you don’t follow @nlds.
Alas, this is now the only option. Before, it was the default setting that you didn’t receive replies of people you don’t follow, but you could turn on the option to receive all replies.
Curious what Twitter will do about this. Actually, I was quite happy with the default setting. Too much replies = too much noise for me. But of course you should have the choice to listen to the noise. Personally, I think Twitter made this decision because it costs them less trafic and API calls…
June 14th, 2009 on 17:16
The funny/sad thing is, twitter already has language recognition built in. I really don’t see their reasoning behind not being able to filter languages in tweets, it would make their service so much more effective!
July 2nd, 2009 on 15:45
Yes this is a problem I have too for my band.
We are based in France but we are English speaking we want to post updates in both English and French.
I have opened 2 twitter accounts http://twitter.com/something__else (English)
and http://twitter.com/_somethingelse (French).
What do you think are the down sides of this solution?
December 20th, 2009 on 10:34
As a bilingual person in Paris, I tweet in both English and French from one account @health20paris, information directed to one or the other set of followers, depending on what it is.
I see other colleagues tweeting in two languages. Followers just skip the 2nd language tweets if they can’t read them.
French people who know me will find me by looking for my name on Twitter.