What would my answer be? I told you before that I will not leave my country due to the views of Horia-Roman PATAPIEVICI on the subject. Not physically, at least. But, on the other hand:
1. Two of the most important blogs I own are in English, and are targeting mostly an English audience (you wouldn’t say that by looking at my traffic analysis, but still);
2. You can see on my Last FM profile that a lot of the singers I like are not Romanians;
3. Most of the movies I watch are not from Romania (I actually have a small phobia on watching Romanian movies due to the small budget, thus lack of quality);
4. My Google Reader application is filled with English feeds (I actually started adding some French sources too);
5. A lot of the things at supermarkets I buy are not from Romania;
6. Most of the electronics I have are out of this country;
7. As an Internet-geek, I use a lot of web sites outside Romania;

Still, I can say that:
1. All my relatives are Romanian;
2. My friends are Romanian;
3. Most of my workplaces I worked were filled with Romanians;
4. The persons I meet daily are (surprise, surprise!) Romanians;
5. I read mostly Romanian news;
6. The things I buy at the local marketplace are from Romanian persons (I wouldn’t call them peasants, but it’s not far from that);
7. Most of the time I speak, think and read in Romanian.

So, I would say that most people I’m surrounded with are from Romania, while a lot of the things I do, read and use are not Romanian-specific. It is a surprising fact to see things like this. I didn’t expect foreign customs, items and creations to be so important in my life. Writing this article was quite a discovery for me.

Here’s the official announcment of this job title (I just formatted the text):

“We at Lionbridge www.lionbridge.com are continuing to work to improve the quality and recognition of languages by expanding our collection of data (emails, reports (articles, thesis, and college reports), letters and blogs) to help develop language tools e.g. spell checker and increase the word count for your language. To do this, we are collecting data from many people world-wide.

To check if you qualify please answer the following questions:

• Do you write and save your sent emails in your native language?
• Do you write or maintain a personal blog?
• Are you in college in college and write / save your draft reports?
• Are you a journalist and save your draft articles?
• Are you interested in earning additional money on work already completed?

If you have answered yes to any of the above questions, then congratulations! You have passed the first step of qualification. Please contact datacol.bal@lionbridge.com  and we will help you to find out more details and provide you with out FAQ. All replies must be returned in English please.”

So, if you qualify, you know what to do. Let me give you a few hints on Lionbridge:
1. From my experience, they are a serious employer, they will pay you for you results, no question asked; they are assertive, and will provide you with technical help;
2. I don’t think they’d compromise their image, so your data is pretty much secure;
3. You should choose carefully if you wish to enter the program for email data; the emails must have been written by you, they can’t be text that are found easily on the Internet;
4. You should especially adhere to this program if you have a large quantity of emails written personally by you; the payment is proportional with the amount of emails you have;
5. (if you’re a Romanian reading this) Romanian-language specific characters (ăîâşţ) are not a must, but they are preferred.

Having read all these, I wish you best of luck if you decide to apply for this program.

1. What does my software do?
My PHP add-on does one single trick: helps you put HTML emails. It works great with Gmail (tested it a lot on some of my blogs, see the end of this blog post), and it works not-so-bad with Yahoo! Mail (only done a few tests, though).
It also try to fix a bug of WordPress for breaking posts that contain Unicode characters.

2. What does my software doesn’t do?
Unicode characters are a big pain for WordPress. There are some characters which are poorly converted. This problem is also common for sending emails. What’s the solution? I’ll present my case story: whenever I send an email that has Unicode characters, I first try to convert those Unicode characters into ASCII. This can be solved quite easily in Notepad (under Windows Operating System). Just create a blank document in Notepad, put the Unicode text in there. Save it. Notepad usually warns you that if you want don’t save as Unicode, you’ll lose some formatting. Hit Ok, then reopen the document. Most Unicode texts are gone. There are still some problems (quotes, for example, are not converted) and for those … I’ve created a different software. See the blog post in here.

3. How can you personalize the blog to work only for your email address?
You can replace this line:
if (( is_email($author) ) && ($author == ‘PUTYOUREMAILADDRESSINHERE@SOMEMAIL.COM’)) {

with this line:
if ( is_email($author) ) {

Also, replace these two lines:
// Author not found in DB, set status to pending.  Author already set to admin.
$post_status = ‘publish’;
with these two lines:
// Author not found in DB, set status to pending.  Author already set to admin.
$post_status = ‘pending’;

Finally, replace these three lines:
if (!$userdata) {
$post_author = 1;
$author_found = false;
with these three lines:
if (!$userdata) {
$post_author = 1;
$author_found = true;

4. What should you note?
I am not responsible for errors you might encounter with your software. You can leave a comment below and explain your errors, and I’ll see what I can do, you can post your errors on WordPress’s support page or search its archives. Please note that this is my very first software in PHP and I’ve learned the commands mostly by trial and error.

5. Ok, ok, where’s the software? Download link?
You can download my software in here:
wp-mail.php made by Olivian BREDA. Use at your own risk

Use it at your own risk.

6. How do you know it works?
Well, I’ve tested it for a few months now. These are the blogs where I’ve tested my software:

• Fii eficient! – Blog despre eficienta
• Conferinte. Blogul WordPress
• Grupul Fotografilor Interesati de Concursuri (gfic)
• Ortodoxie – blog despre evenimente ortodoxe