Today I was reading an article on "Top 20 des blogs les plus influents en Europe" and I found many comments from France asking for a separate list of French blogs.
The subject of the post was easy: a web site (Wikio) is trying to make a list of the top read european blogs.
Full stop. No interpretation possible.
But French readers were not happy with that (as usual, I daresay). They wanted to have their list of blogs. They wanted Internet blogs to be weighted on the effective number of bloggers for each language. Sounds crazy, n'est-ce pas? French do believe that their language is still a reference in this virtual world. How silly. Internet is dominated by English and, until Chinese explosion, this won't change. The world does not go back. Languages change and evolve in unpredicted matters and you French should stop trying to embalm this flow.
For the audience, you should know that French are very narrow-minded. As an insider, I can tell you they never go on holiday in places where French is not spoken. That's why they limit their overseas trips to the DOM-TOM (Overseas departments and territories of France). If they cross a border they assume everybody should be ready to interact with them in French. If they buy a software, they immediately ask for the manual in French, be it or not a French software!
Sometimes ago I bought a Garmin GPS and I was astonished discovering on the forums that French were not able to decipher the provided manual in English. Going through the posts on E-bay, I found out that if a French manual was not joined to the GPS they would send the product back to the seller...
When coming to France you will soon realize that they have their own travel guides, Le Routard, while the rest of the world can do with Lonely Planet Guides...
I could go on and on and on, but I would waste then the possibility to make this blog grow up. So come back for future posts and you will find that French pompousness has no boundaries. The sky is the limit! Even though...
The subject of the post was easy: a web site (Wikio) is trying to make a list of the top read european blogs.
Full stop. No interpretation possible.
But French readers were not happy with that (as usual, I daresay). They wanted to have their list of blogs. They wanted Internet blogs to be weighted on the effective number of bloggers for each language. Sounds crazy, n'est-ce pas? French do believe that their language is still a reference in this virtual world. How silly. Internet is dominated by English and, until Chinese explosion, this won't change. The world does not go back. Languages change and evolve in unpredicted matters and you French should stop trying to embalm this flow.
For the audience, you should know that French are very narrow-minded. As an insider, I can tell you they never go on holiday in places where French is not spoken. That's why they limit their overseas trips to the DOM-TOM (Overseas departments and territories of France). If they cross a border they assume everybody should be ready to interact with them in French. If they buy a software, they immediately ask for the manual in French, be it or not a French software!
Sometimes ago I bought a Garmin GPS and I was astonished discovering on the forums that French were not able to decipher the provided manual in English. Going through the posts on E-bay, I found out that if a French manual was not joined to the GPS they would send the product back to the seller...
When coming to France you will soon realize that they have their own travel guides, Le Routard, while the rest of the world can do with Lonely Planet Guides...
I could go on and on and on, but I would waste then the possibility to make this blog grow up. So come back for future posts and you will find that French pompousness has no boundaries. The sky is the limit! Even though...
1 comment:
Hi. You have a very interesting blog, I am blogrolling you!
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