fiLi's world offers some SEO lessons for the Chinese search engine Baidu. I was surprised at the suggestion to use automatic translation tools to get some initial exposure in the Chinese market. Although this blog reports anecdotal evidence of this working, I wonder if the ensuing traffic is junk traffic (and sticking around to read the auto-translated blogs)?

A great story here about the blogging community in China. While the Chinese government claims that democracy is 100 years away, one has to wonder if the growing middle class, and the new mobility and freedom of expression springing up will make this prediction quite laughable within a decade's time.

Bullog is a web2.0 site based on RSS that collect a great deal of China’s elite bloggers’ posts (authorized). In a short 5 months, its traffic rank of Alexa rises to 11964 and is continuously growing.

On Bullog, readers are able to read articles of most Chinese famous bloggers. For example, Ark the blogger who combats TCM (Traditional Chinese Medicine), Han-Han the well-known young author who is an idol of many high-school students, and Fatty Luo who rails against nonsensical ways of writing or teaching, who happens to be its founder.

I'm not surprised at the language selection here, just surprise that other languages were not included in the translation as well. Will the focus of oil and gas terminology translation become primarily Russian and Chinese?

Indeed, when world energy leaders gathered in Houston last week to dissect industry issues, their remarks were translated from English into only two other languages -- Russian and Chinese.

Daniel Yergin, chairman of conference sponsor Cambridge Energy Research Associates, said the language selection "just reflects the force of globalization." So did the delegates' list: 55 countries were represented at the influential energy conference, including a large contingent from Russia.

    "Long time no see", a word-for-word Chinese-English translation, is now a standard English phrase, and more Chinglish terms are on their way according to the experts.

    "Because of China's growing influence, it now has more impact on Global English than native English-speaking countries. That's pretty astonishing," said GLM president Paul JJ Payack.

*** 

The question then becomes, 'Where does English go from here?'

    One possibility is the plethora of localized "lishes", such as Chinglish, Hinglish (a Hindi-English hybrid) and Spanglish (an English-Spanish hybrid). Eventually, these lishes could branch so far from standard English that they become mutually unintelligible tongues sharing a common root, much as Latin did in Medieval Europe.

    Another possibility is that an internationally standardized form of English will facilitate global communication in ways yet unseen.

    "It's difficult to predict," said Payack, who believes that if the lishes splinter, Chinglish will likely become the most prominent offshoot by virtue of sheer numbers.

    "What's interesting here," Payack said, "is that we're talking about the possibility of the Chinese becoming the owners of the English language."