Translation - first (personal) feedback.

[This probably makes more sense now that I actually published the translated version - see this post...]

The previous post was to see a) if posting in French as well could generate traffic that posting in English does not, b) to see how challenging or easy it could possibly be. (Disclosure: I'm essentially fluent in French, but my gramer and speleing sukes... if you get me.)

• It's not a hard process per se, but it's time consuming. I pushed my text through Babelfish, corrected the text, and then re-added the links.
• Obviously, there isn't a bunch of very relevant text in the post that would only be found in French (I mean, the French name for WineCampFrance is... WineCampFrance.). Hey, it was a spur-of-the-moment decision....
  
• The automated translation tools do a fairly middling job of translating. It's often easy enough to correct by hand, but for example, in my case, I can never remember the damn accents, and I have to rewrite the English with an aim to get Google/ Babelfish to use the word I'm going for, to make sure I've spelled it correctly.
• What the above is implying that I don't feel confident posting the first translation swipe on my blog, because as Marnie sez - "blogging scales stupidity". I.e. mistakes here are seen by larger groups than in personal emails (for example) and stay published indefinitely. So I want to make a reasonable effort to make it readable. But that is a barrier to posting in another language that I am reasonably fluent in - and if I have that problem, I'm positive there are tons (no, millions) of competent-but-non-native-English speakers who are not posting in English because of this same fear - which means when I do English-language searches I'm missing them, and they are missing me - even if we could communicate easily once we found each other....
  
• The other time consuming challenge is that I had to re-paste all the "link layer" URL addresses - it wasn't a matter of cutting and pasting in URLS - I had to add the links by hand again. Oh how I long for a blog plug-in that will translate in the blog-post on the fly....
• The next step in my experiment is to sign up for NativeText. More to come....