IndieWeb Carnival: Multilingualism in a Global Web

This is my first time participating in a IndieWeb Carnival. I had seen this name floating around before, but I have never participated. After reading both Manuel Moreale’s and Jan-Luka’s posts, I got interested, especially due to the topic: multilingualism in a global web. This month’s edition is hosted by ZinRicky.

As you probably know, I was born and raised in Portugal. Therefore, I grew up speaking Portuguese and that’s my mother language. That is something that will never change. I lived in Portugal until the age of 20, and then I ended up moving to the Netherlands. At the moment I’m comfortable in three languages, at varying degrees: Portuguese, English and Dutch.

For the first 17 years of my life, most of it was conducted in Portuguese. The only times I had to speak in another language were during the classes of this said language, so English or Spanish. When I started this blog, back in 2014, I did it in Portuguese. However, after a certain time, I realized I wanted to write in English because I wanted to be able to improve my English skills. And it came with the added bonus that more people would be able to understand it - at the time I probably didn’t realize that Portuguese is actually the 6th most spoken language in the world by native speakers.

Since then, I stopped writing in Portuguese. And the reasons resonate immensely with what Manuel described on his post: if you’re going to write in your native language, you’ll likely spend much more time trying to perfect your sentences, your words, you want it to sound like a masterpiece, while it doesn’t have to be.

Sempre que quero escrever algo em Português, tenho que pensar imenso tempo sobre como construir a frase. Qual é a melhor forma de escrever uma determinada ideia? Apesar de estar satisfeito com quase todas as frases que escrevi em Inglês, estou completamente insatisfeito com quase todas as frases que escrevo em Português. Tenho a ideia de que tudo o que escrevo em Português não é bom o suficiente.

More recently, I have also written in Dutch, maar dat is iets wat ik sinds juli niet meer heb gedaan. Mijn doel toen was om mijn Nederlands te verbeteren, maar nu is het goed genoeg voor mijn dagelijks leven, dus ik voel geen behoefte om in het Nederlands meer te schrijven.

Oddly enough, English is still the language where I feel I can express myself the most easily. It doesn’t mean it’s the most accurate - that’d likely be Portuguese at times, but also not always -, but the most easily. Maybe it comes from the fact that my English vocabulary is still more limited in comparison to my Portuguese vocabulary.

I have considered having this blog in multiple languages, and translating the posts that I would feel need a translation, but I’ve never done it. For now, my posts page is just a mix of languages, but everything other than English is flagged, literally, with a flag. I see others write in different languages, but I almost always default to reading content in English. It’s very rare that I stumble upon a blog post that I want to read and go translate it. Even Portuguese content, I don’t see it that often besides a couple of news.

I think that the web is still moving towards speaking a common language, which is English. But I wonder what would happen if the other way around would be the case. Translating tools work pretty good nowadays, but I think the problem there is that you’ll always feel like you’re missing the essence and the feel. It happens sometimes when you read translated books, especially if they’re translated from a language you know. I’ve once read a Portuguese book in English because I couldn’t find the original in the Netherlands, and sometimes it felt just… a bit cringe and odd.

I’m curious to see which other posts pop up about this topic.