Multiple Twitter accounts for multiple languages
Fortunately, I’ve been able to communicate in different languages (so far, in Japanese, English, and partly German). Twitter account is no exception; I’ve been tweeting in different languages.
When I look at the people I’m following (and people who follow me), tweeting in different languages wasn’t a trivial issue ; how do you feel to read the others tweets which is written in a way you never understand (or really hard to do so)? So I first made different accounts for English and Japanese.
kirameister_en
kirameister_ja
kirameister_de
Life wasn’t that easy after that. You always have to switch browsers to tweet from the right account. You could have a multiple accounts by using a service like Hootsuite, but it took me more courage to tweet, compared to the time with simple and single Twitter account.
I’ve been thinking, “since it’s quite obvious that the purpose of multiple Twitter account is to tweet in different languages, how about writing a script which does so automatically?”. I could tweet using one account, the script reads those posts, detect in which language each of them is written, and post the tweet using an appropriate account, according to the language detected.
So far, it’s been working well. And I’m hoping it will (since the code I wrote was somewhat ad-hoc; I’m not using Twitter API since there doesn’t seem to be such feature (if I’m not mistaken). Perhaps it’s the time to look at which Twitter (posting) client is the easiest to use ;-)
I must say, I quite enjoy seeing your posts in three languages all in one channel – be it Facebook or Twitter. I myself post alternatingly in German or English and have not heard people complain about that.
I will, of course, admit to frequently having to use Google Translate (http://translate.google.com/) to understand any of your Japanese posts. But that’s quite OK.
> Alexander
I’m glad and happy to hear that there’s someone who enjoys that. My main channel (Twitter and Facebook and mixi, which is biggest Japanese SNS) stays as it is now; I thought it was rather a supplemental for those who rather like to receive my activities in one language (and I sort of got sick of multiposting, even if there’s a service like Hootsuite).