Yeah, like that policy.

But this still leaves us a dilemna of what to do about moderating posts in foreign languages. Still, worry about it when it happens.

[Site will of course now be deluged with comments in Russian, Urdu, Japanese etc etc]

Ruthie has a good excuse: she’s just a chick - but I haven’t. In my defence I was probably executing a policy of do what Ruthie says since I pissed her off recently and didn’t want more nagging
anche, io parlo d’Italiano (ma, soltanto un po’) - but even so that is a double non-excuse.

apologies FulviaLeopardi

Having said that we still need to be able to moderate comments on the site even if they are trackbacks. And moderation always needs to be done quickly. I don’t want anything racist or defamatory on the site any longer than absolutely necessary even if it is in a foreign language.

I don’t personally know a Italian speaker who I can contact at short notice to look at the blog, unless you can recommend someone. But I certainly have no desire to alienate our blogging brethern in Italy.

I’ll be interested to see what Geeklawyers take is on all of this, once he’s managed to drag himself out of a bar in Vilnius..:-)

You’ll notice these excerpts appear in the comments section when you link to earlier posts on your own blog. They are just a way to note that another blog references the piece and provides a short excerpt in order to give it some context.

The ‘comment’ was just such a heads up. This means that they weren’t writing in Italian to irritate your readers, but because that’s the language _they_ write _their_ blog in.

Whether you want the trackback or not is another matter (and is of course up to you Geeklawyer), but it seems unfair that they should have to write in English on their blog just because they link to yours.

I’m not sure that to castigage somebody who is only promoting you to a new, Italian, readership is the best way to promote your blog. Surely you could find somebody with enough Italian knowledge to know if it was spam or not? (And if not then shame on you - presumption of innocence?)

The English are lazy when it comes to foreign languages, working on the basis that everyone else speaks English so why bother. Its also quite an unpleasantly colonialist attitude. You’ll see from my latest post above that speaking a foreign language got two men thrown off a plane. Other passenger have described it as sounding like Arabic. I would be surprised if the men were speaking Arabic, far more likely to be Punjabi, but I very much doubt that the passenger overhearing them would be able to tell the difference.

I do speak a foreign language but I wouldn’t converse in it on the blog on the basis it would exclude so many people.

Presumably your English is good enough for you to have understood my post, and despite what you say, doesn’t seem so bad. So I welcome your comments, but please SPEAK ENGLISH!