The Week in Bloggingportal: (Mis)Understanding Europe Multilingually

Maltese fireworks competition to celebrate the 2nd anniversary of Malta joining the EU. ©Giblet (flickr)

Sometimes you wake up with a crazy idea, like trying to get a text translated into every EU and European national or minority language with the help of the European online community – and all within less than a week.

Thursday was just such a day and when I wrote to my fellow Bloggingportal.eu editors in the afternoon asking what they’d think about “a little experiment” I saw both excitement and some hesitation.

One day later, thanks to this blog, our collective Twitter feed, our Facebook fan page, our own blogs (e.g. here and here) and our personal Twitter accounts, but especially thanks to many people from all over the European continent, we were about six days ahead of schedule.

Some of those people participating in this experiment hadn’t even heard about Bloggingportal.eu before Friday, but together with them we managed, in just one day, to have a short text related to the European Citizens’ Initiative and our appearance at the upcoming re:publica 10 conference in Berlin translated into all 23 official languages of the EU plus several minority and other European languages and as well as into Esperanto (for all the results see the comments of this post).

Surprising that the crazy idea of a Bloggingportal.eu editor can have such an effect, isn’t it?

I have to admit that it surprised me, too, especially the speed at which this happened. But maybe it is only half as surprising when we take a look at the diversity and range of the Bloggingportal editors’ euroblog choices of the last week – all of which can be found in our “Editors’ Choice” RSS feed:

1) At the beginning of the week, Jon and eurosocialiste (both Bloggingportal.eu editors) slammed the European Commission’s proposal for the rules of the European Citizens’ Initiative in English while Samuel Faure nailed star-blogger-journalist Jean Quatremer in French regarding the quality and consistency of his journalistic work.

2) On Tuesday, TimesLT had a brilliant analysis of the European and transatlantic external security policy and the lack of a common EU foreign policy in Lithuanian while Tratados couldn’t resist attacking the European Internal Security Strategy – a policy issue almost unnoticed by the European press – in Portuguese.

3) At Telos, Etienne showed in her analysis (in French) how social scientists proved that being in favour of the death penalty and being anti-European were closely related while in a human rights blog PhD student William explained (in English) why the death penalty has been abolished by the European Court of Human Rights for all European countries.

4) And if that wasn’t already enough for you, you could learn why Brussels lobbyists shouldn’t go on Easter holidays or how transparency in Denmark and Norway was linked to transparency in the EU institutions.

5) If you prefer topics related to international politics, you could try to understand (thanks to an extensive blog post by Catherine) why the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE) cannot cope with the crisis in Kyrgyztan or, thanks to some sharp argumentation by Bruce, how the US-American Congress could best cooperate with the European Parliament.

6) Finally, and unfortunately, the Polish tragedy led to intensive discussions on the euroblogging/eurodebating platform European Tribune and to more than 20 euroblog reactions coming from all around the continent and written in a several European languages.

If we can find euroblogs with such a diverse range of topics covered by such a diverse group of people in multiple European languages, perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised we were able to reach out to the European public so well within the space of a single day?

However, despite the diversity of people and content we dig up, Bloggingportal.eu is still a very small non-profit project run by a bunch of people without any budget; a project that is only running thanks to our crazy idealism, our useless (yet abundant) knowledge of European topics and our incomprehensible strive for collective fun through online and offline collaboration.

We have a limited readership and our editors, due to having their own private and professional lives, can only devote time to the project sporadically. Not the best conditions for our little experiment, or so one might think…

However, despite all these obstacles, we are active and well connected in the European online political sphere and we are ready to use these connections to relate European issues to a diverse audience, to post interesting developments, to dig up undiscovered news or to retweet funny stories. This allows us to speak to an audience far beyond the readership of Bloggingportal.eu.

Ultimately, we still don’t know if we’re managing to do all that as well as we could be, but this week’s experience with our little experiment has shown that it ‘s still worth trying!

The Week in Bloggingportal was written by Julien Frisch with the help of Joe Litobarski this week.