It’s tough to own a café.

Every decision you make – be it in regards to function or fashion - dictates what kind of people will come through the door. The kind of beer you pipe in, the style of music you play, the décor on the walls.

Café Babel, one of a few truly multi-lingual magazine websites, re-launched this month. It maintains its hexa-lingualism (that’s six languages, for those of you whose proficiencies don’t include Greek). It continues to be comprised entirely of user-generated content. Articles are translated by an entirely volunteer set of translators.

The nature of the content remains the same: Culture and politics written for and about a young, educated, European audience, simply put.

Which gives the distinct impression that if Café Babel were a real place – which sometimes it is, as the site organises occasional meet-ups – its patrons would be pretty hip.

The clientele would be educated. They would saunter in any night of the week to listen to obscure music, produced by independent labels. Over the up-and-coming tunes, they would be able to speak about economics and global politics. They would likely smoke. Men and women alike would appear a bit worldly – but not like they thought too hard about what clothes or piercings to toss on that day. They would be multi-lingual and well-travelled, at least on the continent.

Mostly, it turns out, the crowd would speak French… Of the 300.000 oh-so-unique visitors to Café Babel each month, most deal in French. The next most dominant language is English, followed by Italian, Spanish, German and Polish.

There are between 15-20 new articles per week to read at Café Babel. Given that all are translated into six languages, that’s about 70 articles posted.

There’s a lot of two-way communication, too. Anybody can comment. No language barriers – content is translated by a friend (albeit with predictable delay – which means more time for sampling the latest Belgian microbrews, anyhow). Also, anyone may take over the open mic – or blog page, as the virtual case were – for as long as they want. To talk about whatever they want.

About 100 patrons are enough into Café Babel are “regulars”. They contribute to about 70 active blogs, some working in teams.

When they weren’t making their own statements, the relatively young bar owners (Café Babel, a non-profit, was started seven years ago by a group of Erasmus students) would be busy highlighting their collection of free photography - picked up at Flickr whenever needed.

Their visual thinking has helped make the latest version of Café Bable is indeed a more visual space. It is a platform with more panache. More “2.0” with the same amount of Eurochic.

Published: May 20, 2008