When I started this blog, I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to write in English or Portuguese. Sure, I live in Brazil and my mother tongue is Portuguese, but most sites and blogs I read are in English – it’s effectively the main language in software development. After thinking about it for a while, I decided to create two identical blogs, one in English and one in Portuguese. That way I could reach a wider audience by writing in English, but also have something for my fellow brazilians.
First, let me explain how my writing “routine” was planned: I would think about a topic and write a blog post in English first. Since I’m not perfectly fluent in English, it’s easier for me to translate something from English to Portuguese than the opposite. After the post was done, I’d then translate it to Portuguese and post both versions at the same time.
It seemed like a good plan, but it never worked. While writing, I kept thinking about how my text would look like after the translation, which made me go back and rewrite phrases all the time so they could look “right” in both languages. And even after all that effort, when I read my own translated posts in Portuguese, they felt wrong. I don’t know how to explain, but the thought process is different in each language, so a translation is never as good as a text originally written in Portuguese. Eventually, I simply lost interest in writing: just thinking about all the burden I had to go through for a simple blog post was enough for me to give up.
Now that we’re starting 2011 (New Year’s resolutions, you know the drill) I thought that trying to keep a schedule of one post per week could be a great challenge for me. But to achieve that, I’d have to change my methods somehow. So I decided to take a look at my blog statistics, and I noticed that 95% of all my traffic was going to the english version. I know that it has been several months since my last post, but while the Portuguese version had days with no traffic at all, the English version kept a steady number of visits every day (mostly thanks to google and my post about VPN sharing).
Long story short: the Portuguese version is gone. By trying to satisfy everyone, I ended up with a blog with no posts and a Portuguese version that never felt right (hence no visits). Not to mention that by keeping the Portuguese version I was going against my own belief: that if you’re a software developer, you should learn English, whether you like the language or not. I advocate that to all my developer friends here in Brazil, and yet I was providing a translation of my own posts to non-english speakers (I know it’s a controversial subject, but I’ll leave that for another post). So now this blog is English only, and hopefully it’ll actually be a blog again (with new posts, you know).
Sorry about the rant. Simply removing the Portuguese version without any explanation didn’t feel right.
(There’s a great analogy in this post about compromise and software development, but I’ll leave that as an exercise to you)