Publishing for Digital South ESL Readers?

Life has been mildly nutty the last few weeks. Between receiving an SMS from my sweetheart announcing the death of his grandmother during one of his business trips in January and weeks of my slowly losing energy and suspecting an ear infection which resulted in running to a primary care physician who prescribed antibiotics, I have temporarily lost that creative spark. It’ll return, but it’s being trumped by more pressing matters that scream for attention.

Luckily, the ear infection was not an ear infection. An ear-throat-nose specialist who diplomatically defended all primary care physicians as well-meaning but inept, lacking the kind of analytical abilities they shouldn’t lack, confirmed that I needlessly took a course of antibiotics. Apparently, according to my ENT, if you put an idea into a primary care physicians mind (e.g. ouch, my ear hurts, is it an infection), then, with a mix of tunnel-vision and questionable analytical skills, they are off and running, determined to find the thing you think you have, and when unclear, defaulting to that thing. A stunning reminder that second opinions are worth the extra cost.

It was a virus. A persistent flu or cold bug, powered by a series of life stressors, with strange symptoms I’ve never experienced before. For weeks, my concentration was good only for Ally McBeal re-runs. Finally, I can actually (almost) form coherent thoughts and get back to my All Things Publishing research.

I am looking for ways to bring alive my desire to enable others to publish by positioning my editorial and marketing skills in this digital format world. An article on the Digital South provoked excitement and a great deal of brainstorming. Dynamism, Localization Typify the Developing “Digital South” discusses the latest digital publishing developments from countries in the southern hemispheres. It makes clear that the borders for writers are melting, in many ways.

For example, I can now imagine that we no longer need to translate materials from English into another language if the reading device includes an app that allows the reader to hover over words and access a definition for whatever they don’t understand.

ESL audiences, those with a desire to read in English as a way to improve their language, but also learn about the topics that excite them, is a big market, one that writers when writing in English often don’t think about. What if editors with a sensitivity to ESL readers could help writers polish their manuscripts without dumbing down the topic or language, making the reading accessible and enjoyable the fluent and not?

There will always be need for translation, and I’m all for it. I don’t want to live in a monolingual world. Being multilingual is a cultural wealth I value. Yet, the point is that writers need readers, and the Digital South audience is huge.

How is my fiction manuscript going, you wonder? Revision #2 is on my To Do list. The last few weeks were a write-off.

And apologies to those of you who visit my site through an iPhone or iPod. I posted a question on the wordpress.org boards to solve the video aspect ratio problem that occurs when using an iPhone in portrait mode (tilting it to landscape mode displays videos as they should be displayed). Not a single reply. The loveliness of free CMS and little desire or time to read the code and figure it out myself.