After a while when I was blogging in Polish, my native language, I decided to make an attempt to switch completely to English, "esperanto of IT world". Main factors which lead me to this decision were:
- feeling that my English language skills are becoming more and more rusty, especially in areas not closely connected with IT and technical language. I know that writing new posts will take more time, but I think it's worth the effort.
- need to be more involved in filling Internet with useful programming stuff and solutions. No one could deny that posts in English are really more helpful than those in other languages. This is even more true if we take into consideration only IT world, when English is language of all information we need and consume everyday: tutorials, documentation, most actual books, etc.
- some voices from Web: post by Paul Szulc in Polish and another convincing post by Jeff Atwood. They both pointed out some good reasons why we all should blog about IT in one, unified language.
In spare time I will translate some old posts from Polish and update page content to conform to "English only" rule :)
So from now on only English posts here. I am eager to read your opinions about this change so feel free to post them in comments :) Also impressions about new blog template from http://www.zenplate.blogspot.com/ are welcome.
UPDATE (two weeks later): I was thinking about formula of this blog and some doubts appeared in my head. Do I really have content which is unique in whole Internet? Recently I thought so, but when I was preparing post in English about book "Effective Java", I found that many, many other people already wrote about similar things and enthusiasm about my post almost disappeared. So what now? I think that most of my post will be in Polish, because I don't want them to duplicate other content from the Web. Moreover writing in Polish will allow me to share some more personal opinions and experiences from programming and my live in general than if I was writing in English. Of course some posts that in my opinion are more unique or interesting will be translated to English.
I apologize for the confusion and my earlier rash decision. I hope it won't happen again :)
I'm sad to have heard so. I assume that you speak English while discussing IT issues/ideas with your Polish friends, too? No?! Should you care about them after all if they're supposed to use English - "esperanto of IT world"? It's a thought-provoking, isn't it?
OdpowiedzUsuńThe only reason to switch to English-speaking blog would be the wider audience, but OTOH you're competing against it and your posts will likely be a copy of many others available in the Internet, don't they? I think that you'd be better off involving yourself in an open source project and being its liaison that switiching to English just for the sake of learning English and publishing stuff already available somewhere else. Perhaps I'm exagerrating a bit, but I hope I'm clear what my take on this is. Am I? I'm looking forward to reading your next posts.
Thank you for your comment. I hope I won't regret my choice despite some drawbacks of my decision. If in few months or year maybe I will see that English blog wasn't the best idea, I'll switch back to Polish. But currently I wanna try and see how this influence my English skills and number of posts I could write regularly.
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