(Since this post has been a draft in my blog box for nearly a month, I decided to break it into several parts and blog little by little. Hope you’ll like the approach)
A recent mistweeet by yours truly led to a suggestion that I write a blog post so that you don’t have to make the same mistake. You could also think of this post as, “How to Avoid Foreign Language Oopses in Social Media.” That said, you’ll be able to apply these tips to many other areas as well.
What I want to do in this post is walk you through how I find out the right way to say “hashtag” – you know, #TheseThingsYouEitherLoveOrHateOnTwitter, in Norwegian, French, and Spanish. What’s extra cool is that I haven’t done this yet, so I’m going to do it in real time and take you with me. Screenshots included! Ready? Let’s go.
First, Norwegian. Messing up the Norwegian version of this was what led to this post, so it makes sense to start here.
Naïvely, I’ll first search in English: “what is hashtag in Norwegian?” Let’s see what comes back…
Ehh…that doesn’t look very promising. But while I was typing the query, I saw something good…let’s see if I can back up a bit and find it…OK, this is what I thought might be it:
When I clicked, through, though, it was just a description of the actual hashtag #spill, and how spill in Norwegian means “game.” So that wasn’t quite it.
It seems like English isn’t working so well! In part 2, I’ll try searching in Norwegian…stay tuned!
