Experiment in bilingual blogging

Liz Henry made a comment and suggestion on a previous post that has got me thinking about doing an experiment in bilingual blogging, maybe for discussing, presenting and reflecting on at BlogHer (July, USA) and/or the 3º Encontro Nacional sobre Weblogs in Portugal (October, Portugal). She says:

I've been thinking it would be a cool exercise to hook up pairs of bloggers to translate each other. They'd have to be pretty fluent to keep up with each other, but it might be a great experiment for, say, a single day, or a week

I would like to try this experiment. I propose to match bloggers in Portuguese with bloggers in English for one week, each one translating the other's posts. Then to reflect on the joys, issues and problems. Even without thinking too hard I have a host of questions:

1. Where to put the translation? On your own blog or the other person's?
2. How would the translator give context to the post? How much context to give?
3. How much would have to be negotiated - rather than just translated. For example, tags.
4. How much would it change what you wrote knowing it would be read in a different language?
5. What are the same/different issues translating from Portuguese to English and from English to Portuguese?
6. What is the advantage of having your posts translated into English? And into Portuguese?
7. Are the issues different for different types of blogs?
8. What technologies did we need/use to carry out the experiment?
9. What technological and social processes helped or hindered?
8. Does pairing up to write blogs in two languages have a future? For whom?

If anyone's interested in joining in the experiment, let me know. My own focus is Portuguese-English but anyone's welcome to do it in other languages.

Tags: bilingualblogging, BlogHer, 3encontro,