I left my first blog comment in Spanish over at Alvaro Gregori’s blog – a great post on things 2.0.
One of my declared goals for 2006 was to work on an opportunity to lecture or train at the University of Costa Rica, where I studied abroad in college. So far, I have drafted a proposal, and now need to refine and determine who the lucky recipient at UCR will be. If there happens to be a UCR reader out there, I would love a referral.
A couple of things I would like community help from are:
- Recommendations for Spanish language blogs – I would love if anyone could refer me to some good tech blogs that are in Spanish – most interested in enterprise architecture and Java-related blogs, but am not picky and at the moment would prefer any suggestions. I have found a couple, but have not looked to hard yet.
- Spanish translations of tech books – I need these for 2 reasons. One is for my own reading to bone up on tech vocabulary, but the other is to donate to the UCR library or individual students. One of my strongest school-related memories was going to the library to do research and looking something up in the card catalog (yes card catalog – even though this was the early 90s). I got to the stack location, found the title in the classic mono-color library hardbound binding, but opened it up to find a complete photocopied version of the title. This was a surprisingly common thing – I suppose authors and publishers here will freak out, but to me it was a glaring statement of the fact that I was in the developing world, however modern it looked compared to other nations. I saw it as a socio-economic coping strategy and was sympathetic. Anyhow, I will soon be appealing to some certain authors directly, but again would appreciate any thoughts or donations.
I am very conversational socially in Spanish, but my technical vocabulary needs a lot of work if I’m going to talk cool on la vida declarativa, la web 2.0, and other tech topics. It’s my intention to lecture in Spanish unless they would prefer English for their own practice.
So please let me know if you could help out in any way!
Scott Mark 
Hi Scott,
I’m sorry with delay in my response (I’ve been a week away). Thank’s for your comment.
I can see you have a perfect spanish so I think you’ll be doing great with your lectures.
The most of my blog readings have more to do with e-learning than information architecture, so I’m not sure if they will fit your interest.
Thanks, Alvaro! I will still be subscribing to your blog for a bit to see what your topics are like – I liked the few posts that I read.
Wouldn’t blogging in Spanish “reduce” sorely needed dialog since not everyone can participate? It is important for us to learn how to communicate in a global economy and not go to background specific preferences.
Besides, others could always use tools such as babelfish…
James, this is ironic timing as I just noticed a hit I got through Google translate – someone reading my previous resume points post in French. So yes, those tools are there.
I don’t think blogging in Spanish reduces dialog – it increases it. No one is going to learn English for the sole purpose of reading my blog, so by blogging in Spanish I’m extending the reach of my thoughts.
As far as excluding non-Spanish speakers, if I ever actual write a whole post or podcast in Spanish, I would consider translating it to English if I thought the content was of value. But I would probably have just been on top of my same old soapbox, just in Spanish – I’m secretly a broken record. So no one would really miss anything! 😉
But the real reason I blog at all is the same reason I keep my Spanish current – so that I can build relationships with people. If blogging in Spanish helps me do that, then I’m meeting my goal.