Cross-lingual interation online: blogging the 2010 Haitian earthquake

Thesis

This research analyzes linguistic barriers and cross-lingual interaction in the blogosphere. The Internet is often thought to democratize access to information; however linguistic barriers remain prevalent. This study seeks to determine the extent to which information about recent world events flows between languages within the blogosphere using blogs discussing the 2010 Haitian earthquake in English, Spanish, and Japanese as a case study.

This study represents a new approach to Internet-language research. Previous studies of language online have either sought to determine the number of pages in different languages or have been relatively small and qualitatively focused. This research, in contrast, constructs a dataset of over 100,000 blogs, examines this set with hyperlink analysis, and qualitatively codes the cross-lingual links. The relationship between two blogs sharing a cross-lingual hyperlink as well as the type of author writing each blog is coded.

Results from this analysis show that in this dataset: 1) English-language blogs are significantly less likely to link cross-lingually than either Spanish or Japanese blogs; 2) Awareness of foreign language content increases among bloggers over time; 3) Most cross-lingual links are created on personal blogs and link to (primarily English-language) media; 4) Most cross-lingual links signal a citation or reference relationship, while a smaller, although not insignificant, number of cross-lingual links signal a translation of blog content.

While the dataset does not show the naive ideal of global discourse, the dataset does reveal a surprising level of human translation in the blogosphere. Such human translation has a superior potential to machine translation in that it can translate cultural meaning in addition to linguistic meaning. Ultimately, some combination of machine translation, human translation, and social encouragement through sites like Global Voices might best increase cross-lingual communication online.

Authors: Hale, S

• Publication date: 2010
• Type of award: MSc
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: Oxford University, UK
• Language: English
• Keywords: Knowledge; Language; Social Network Analysis; Sociolinguistics