The great English opportunity
Given that somebody without informing the greater public has turned Calcuttagutta into an English website, I felt that as a student pursuing a superior understanding in the English language I should write some words to mark the occasion. I haven’t bothered to skim trough all of Calcutta’s articles to check how many of them are written in English, but I fear that that number is as low as the English-speaking people that frequent us, way less than a handful, bordering zero. And I believe that this makes it difficult for some of our non-Norwegian friends, who we wished could take a significant participation in Calcutta, to actually contribute anything.
How many articles have for example Matteus slaved trough with his dictionary, trying his best to understand our complex language only to eventually give up full of tears and then travel the world hiding his shame. And which of the Scots Camilla and Thor met in Edinburgh would have loved to read about our complex relationship with oil, brown cheese and whaling, I suspect all of them. But they are forced to read bastardised Babelfish versions, and then get frustrated and angry when the translation only talk about physics and insulting Kjelling comments. And who would blame them, a successful webpage can’t live on physics and insults alone even if the main contributor writes thousands of articles a week. No it needs an edge, something that makes it different, something that’s not mainstream like science and fun articles that’s as informing as Wikipedia.
This English-week I believe is the perfect way for us to create an edge, for how many Norwegian websites offers its readers an English version, only one (
Aftenposten), and now it’s two. I therefore applaud Thor for his efforts to bring English readers into the warm embrace of our Calcutta inhabitants. I think we all have something interesting to share with the outside world, be it our love of literature, science or history of moustaches, except Acugmqxx he really is no good. But if there are any plans of a nynorsk-week or German-week you can all go and fuck yourselves, I haven’t forgotten the horrors of high school; we don’t need to accommodate those damn readers.
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