Net Increase? Cross-Lingual Linking in the Blogosphere

This research analyzes linguistic barriers and cross-lingual interaction through link analysis of more than 100,000 blogs discussing the 2010 Haitian earthquake in English, Spanish, and Japanese. In addition, cross-lingual hyperlinks are qualitatively coded. This study finds English-language blogs are significantly less likely to link cross-lingually than Spanish or Japanese blogs. However, bloggers' awareness of foreign language content increases over time. Personal blogs contain most cross-lingual links, and these links point to (primarily English-language) media. Finally, most cross-lingual links in the dataset signal a citation or reference relationship while a smaller number of cross-lingual links signal a translation. Although most bloggers link to other blogs in the same language, the dataset reveals a surprising level of human translation in the blogosphere. Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona, and Yuko Tokumori for their assistance with the qualitative coding. interested in language separation online and the effects of design upon the transmission of information between languages. CROSS-LINGUAL LINKING 2 Net Increase? Cross-lingual Linking in the Blogosphere In mid-2009, the Japanese police arrested two foreign teachers on suspicion of importing drugs with the intention to distribute them. The story received national attention in Japan, but the discussion was entirely in Japanese with the names of the teachers written in Japanese characters. A few machine translations were posted in forums, but the machine translations so muddled the teachers' names that there were no Google results about the story when searching with the teachers' names in English. This changed one week later when a blogger wrote about the story in English and correctly spelled the teachers' full names. His blog soon became the top search result for their names in English. When the charges were quietly dropped two months later, local papers reported the update, but the blogger—uninterested or busy—never translated news of the charges being dropped to English. His original blog post remains one of the top results for a search of either teacher's name. As this anecdote makes clear, information can pass between language groups online, but what information is passed and by whom it is passed is less clear. In the anecdote, machine translation alone was not sufficient to move the information across the language boundary. A bilingual speaker bridged the gap, but he was selective and through him only news of the teachers' arrest and not their release was translated. Bilinguals who translate information have the opportunity to shape opinion on news and politics, …