English is the lingua franca of programming but the DEV community is polyglot
Should I write in English or in my mother tongue ?
I think many of us here have asked us this question.
But the answer is actually obvious
Writing is its own reward
Social Media and its vanity metrics everywhere taught us the wrong lessons.
Writing, even just for yourself, on paper or on your computer, is always a useful exercice.
Writing in english is a great idea for your career, for too many reasons to write down.
Writing in your mother tongue is also super positive, because at playing with mother tongue is actually a very big deal in life.
Also don't worry about the DRY principle here. You write for a different audience, with different references, a different mindset.
Translating is a creative act.
No one will be mad at you for writing in a language they don't understand
Most people will ignore you, but that's what we already do most of the time.
It's absolutely fine.
Cross posting is good
Editor Note: I will now cross-post all my english and french content on DEV.to and on my website https://desviesdedevs.jmfayard.dev/
That's how I now start all my posts on DEV.to
I do that to get the best of both world.
On my substack, I have a small but great audience that likes my posts and receive them by email.
Even if nobody interacted with my content on DEV.to, the platform has a SEO strength that I will absolutely never have.
But people do interact on DEV.to
Here are some proof that you can have readers in your mother tongue
A bilingual brazilian portuguese - english interview
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Featured Org of the Month: Feministech
Michael Tharrington for The DEV Team ・ Mar 22
A read who has read 4 ways to judo mansplaining and then went on to read 🇫🇷 4 prises de judo contre le mansplaining
Just saw the French version and it is even more funny, kudos!
I absolutely loved "...vous pouriez mec-spliquer" 😂
A cool comment in esperanto
Bonega artikolo. Mi komencis pasigi tian intervjuon kaj viaj kolsiloj estas saĝaj 😉
Tamen kiel kandidato mi ĉiam diris ke mi deziras plu esti programisto kaj post kvin jaroj, mi havos pli da kompetencoj kaj pli bone laboros 😁
Kelkaj firmaoj starigas tiun demandon por scii ĉu la kandidato povas evolui en tia firmao (se la kandidato deziras iĝi arĥitekto kaj la firmao ne havas tian postenon, ili scios ke la kandidato deziros ŝanĝi post 5 jaroj)
A german reader who take the time and effort to answer me in french
Je pensais toujours que c'était les Allemands qui ne savent pas accepter aucune faute grammaticale ou formelle et qui toujours trouvent quelque chose qui est fausse. Mais les mauvaises examples de ce type of gens étaient et sont les profs de francais aux écoles allemands.
Les gens que j'ai rencontré en France, Belgie, Suisse ou Tunisie etaient tranquil sans fixation sur leur langue, sauf en Paris ou on m'avait donné des lecons.
J'aime les "FOTES", ca resemble un peu les bandes dessinées underground à l'age des "K7" (cassettes de musique).
Merci pour l'inspiration de trouver du contenu en francais ici! Je suis étonné que je le sais encore. Et excusez moi pour ne savoir comment écrire une cédille sur cet ordinateur. Ma FOTE!
I rest my case : write in all your languages
The emoji convention
I suggest to follow my convention to start the title with the "language emoji" (actually country emoji) to make us all visible
And follow your language tags
In no particular order
#spanish
Merci beaucoup - muchas gracias - grazie - danke sehr - obrigado - arigatou gozaimasou
In particular to @ingosteinke @michaeltharrington @lelepg @morgannadev @pachicodes @axel584
What Should You Do Next ?
A thousand miles journey begins with a single step.
🇫🇷 Prends un article que tu as déjà écrit. Publie le sur DEV.to avec l'emoji qui va bien. Fais en la pub dans les commentaires ci-dessous. Comme ça tu peux être sûrε qu'au moins une personne va le lire.
🇩🇪 Ich vermute, du hast bestimmt irgendwann in deinem Leben, etwas interesantes auf Deutsch geschrieben ? Nimm den text und veröffentlicht es auf DEV.to. Dann mach mal ein bisschen Werbung in die Kommentare
🇪🇸 Busca un articulo bueno qué ya has escrito en otro lugar. Publicalo aqui en DEV.to. Y después mandame el enlace en los comentarios. Asi qué pudedes estar seguro qué almenos una persona lo lee.
Top comments (38)
I love this idea, and I hate it in equal amount.
I'm working for a Japanese company, and the language barrier is a huge obstacle. I definitely would encourage more tech articles on Japanese, it's a great way to share knowledge, and it is really needed - I know that half of my team would benefit.
But I can't be a part of that conversation, and that frustrates me to no end. The best things about tech are collaboration, openness, inclusion, open-source and community. I worry that non-English content will cause massive breaks. So I feel that I cannot encourage this.
But I'll do it! I will try to find the benefits. I can focus on the pleasure of writing - I definitely agree with that part - and I'll try to find other good parts. I'll also try to find the limits - when is it detrimental to the community to have multiple languages? One thing that comes to mind is coding - I still strongly believe that all code should be done exclusively in English.
Anyway, even if I don't agree, I'll try it, and I thank you for this idea. It's out of the box, and only for that reason and I like it.
You can become part of the conversation, because you can in fact learn to speak enough of Japanese with confidence to do that.
Learning a foreign language is easier than people assume. Human beings are naturally gifted at learning languages, that's why you can take any baby in the world, put it in a country with a supposedly impossibly difficult to learn language, and it will work with 100% success rate.
There's a catch though, you need to forget about the wrong ideas you have about how to learn a language, in order to make places for better strategies.
The go to website for this is my friend Benny Lewis, the irish polyglot
fluentin3months.com/
Here are resources for Japanese specifically
fluentin3months.com/resources/japa...
GAMBATE!
PS: here is my dog Linda, she can understand at least 20 words in Japanese
Yeah idk about that. I don't consider myself to be good at language.
On Japanese, the problem is compounded by the writing system - I really can't see myself picking that up anytime soon, and I can't see much benefit without it.
Problem solved easily, don't learn kanjis and focus on speaking. That's what I did.
So then how can I read and write articles, documentation, or even Slack messages?
The barrier would be lowered indeed, but not enough. I wouldn't be able to join in the conversion. People take years to learn what they call business level Japanese.
That link you shared says "have a conversation in 3 months" - sure, but it will be about ordering sushi, not about private connectivity on GCP, which incidentally is what I need to talk about next week.
It’s impossible to go fast from where you are today to talking about GCP connectivity in Japanese without having lots of conversations about eating sushis in the middle.
To learn to speak Japanese, you must speak Japanese early and then often.
you need to make friends with whom you speak in Japanese about sushis etc
This is so good bro! I love this...
I am Indonesian, I am in!
That's great imam, waiting for your first article here :)
I love this post so much Jean-Michel! 💚
And I second everything ya said, haha! I def encourage everyone to write in whatever language they want to. And, it's absolutely cool for folks to post multiple versions of their articles in different languages. I see that as a perk!
Also, I'd challenge folks to interact with each other across languages even if you're not that comfortable using the language right now. If you're practicing English, Portuguese, French, etc. — our community is a great place to flex those skills and get better. On a similar note, I'm not actually practicing other languages, but I enjoy interacting with folks from other cultures, so I just pull out Google Translate and use it to jump into the conversation; we live in a time where it's easy to translate words in seconds and nothing is holding us back from communicating with one another. So, why not?!
I think a special part of our community is just how global it is. I can talk with you (Jean-Michel) all the way from across the Atlantic... and someone else who is from an entirely different part of the world can read what we say and hop in the discussion too if they wanna. It's amazing and it's all made possible because of software developers collaborating! When we come together, we can make amazing things happen.
So please, communicate in whatever language you wanna, share ideas, be open to other cultures, and, as always, treat everyone with kindness and respect. 🙌
Salut Michael, merci beaucoup pour tes encouragements. Et oui c'est exactement ça, le monde informatique est une tour de Babel, et pour l'instant nous n'avons pas été punis par le Créateur. Alors profitons en !
I even wrote a song in multiple languages
Bonjour 👋 Je vais traduire toute ma série Mastering RiotJS and français, voici le premier article:
🇫🇷 Base d'une application RiotJS avec Vite
Steeve ・ May 19
Pas mal DEV.to d'un point de vue SEO, non ? :P
DEV.to a un référencement de dingue, on apprécit et on prend le jus :D
Whenever the topic of using multiple languages comes into discussion, I always remember of Lera Boroditsky's Ted Talk How language shapes the way we think. Language is really something very powerful, and if we have many languages at our disposal, we definitely should take advantage of that.
Cool! Great idea. I keep an eye on #braziliandevs to level up my Portuguese. And I've enjoyed some of your French articles. I haven't read them all. I don't want to lose my French, so it's killing two birds with one stone, reading about tech and learning vocabulary in other languages. 💪
Well yes, that's what I said, that's why I don't understand why the thread even started.
I indeed said that writing in english is good, also I've written 100+ articles in english on DEV, so it's not like writing in another language made me unable to write in english.
Also telling people to not express themselves in their mother tongue, which is like the sandardiest standard in the history of mankind, that would be crazy. So I assume that noone is suggesting that.
The only question was wether there is a choice to be made, and the point of my article.
No, write in both, why not ?
A thought just occurred, and hopefully it is useful starting point, and not merely an empty bubble :)
As Lev has mentioned, why not author an article in a language of choice, as there is, as far as I am aware, nothing to stop you doing so. Importantly, however, tag it so as to clearly identify the language (there may need to be some co-ordination over the tag format, and so forth ?).
Run the post through a translator into English, and post that as well. Language tagging may not be required since an untagged post can be assumed to be in English, simply because it is the default language of the website, not because it is "superior" to any other language :).
The tagging is important - obviously - to avoid non-English posts appearing in default feeds, and to allow browsing of articles in a selected language.
Doing so should help ensure:
I believe in standards (so we can all understand one another, and more easily, and reliably, manage information), and inclusiveness and diversity. Hopefully this "thought" helps in achieving all those aims.
Yep, a starting point of that is the
#spanish
tag alongside the🇪🇸
emoji in the titleThat could be automated actually, it's pretty easy to auto detect the language of a given post
The main thing that's missing from DEV/FOREM after that would be for the algorithm to include the information of which languages people want to read or not
Forget about limiting, it's impossible and uninteresting to write for everyone.
There are 6 billions people on earth, and maybe 1.000 to 10.000 will read any given article.
Who talked about publishing the same articles in two languages each time ?
Typically the subject matter dictate the language.
If I want to talk about what's new in React, of course I will write about it in english.
If I want to write about my engineering school in France, of course I will write about it in French.
Sexism in tech is strong both in France and elsewhere, so in this case, I translated the article.
I am not offended, it just seems weird that you come to someone's blog and pretend you know what and how he should write.
I actually do what I want you know.