Geek Test Translations
I think it's really cool that people want to translate the Geek Test into other languages. A couple years ago, a guy from Belgium named Frank Delanshare was the first to translate it into French. Stephan Scholz from Germany translated the test into German. I was so excited!
Then I found the test in Spanish when I was doing a Google search... the guy who did it never emailed me to ask permission to copy & translate my test and host it on his site- which he did without even referencing innergeek! I tried to contact him, but he never responded to my emails. Grr. Eventually I went back and saw that he at least linked to my site. All of the other discussions I've had with potential translators have been very good.
I speak Norwegian, but I'm hoping that my friend (and "little brother," since I lived with his family for a year when I was an exchange student) will do that translation. A lot of the questions have to do with cultural things or vocabulary that I'm just not familiar with. I hadn't totally embraced my inner geek yet when I lived there. :)
Somebody emailed me a few months ago with the offer to translate the test into Hebrew, which I thought would have been very interesting. I'm still waiting for a response on that. I also just got an email this evening with an offer to translate it into Portuguese. Other languages I'd like to add to the roster include Chinese, Japanese, Greek and Russian. I'm not sure how to deal with the details of having those non-standard characters on the site, though.
I'm really wishing that I had been able to obtain the .com or .net or .org extensions for my site now. I've come to really enjoy my .us extension, but I think it makes it less accessible as an international bookmark. The essence of the test is mostly American, true, but I think the geek community is a worldly population. Plus, it really irks me that a guy named Toby Corbish has all of those extensions and only uses them as a clumsy homepage that could easily be replaced by Mozilla Firefox extensions and add-ons. I emailed him back in 2002 (when .us was still somewhat unknown) to see if he was going to renew all of those domains. I emailed him again the next time they were up for renewal in 2005. He never responded! So innergeek.us will stay as it is, even if I add more translated tests or mini-sites in different languages.
