Stupid Question 124: Is a bilingual tech blog a good idea?

Bilingual blogs are generally a bad idea for the reasons mentioned above.

It is a lot of work and most of the time, your audience might vary a bit in expectations depending on the language you are communicating in.

At SoftFluent, we have struggled for long to maintain equivalence between US and French blogs (and web sites by the way). This was too much of a work for not so much value.

It turned out that our developer-focused offering through CodeFluent Entities targets professional developers and those one needs to speak English. So we decided to focus our effort on an English-speaking product blog and concentrate on quality of the posts.

For our company blog, we separated SoftFluent US Blog from SoftFluent FR Blog and realized in the process that the audience did not expect the same content on both. For example, our services activity is more local.

Although this might be specific to our business, I think the reasoning should often be the same.

Still we sometimes reuse some content from one blog to the other by translating it, sometimes tweaking it a bit, and this is clearly the way to go. 

(NOTE: I acknowledge that this represents a bias, American-centric point of view.)

- For us to become a global one-world community, we must all speak the same language.

- That language should be English.  (I'd prefer American English over British English, but I'm flexible on that point)  (I have a good rant prepared on why it should be English, but that's a bit off-topic here)

- People who refuse to learn & interact in English are just delaying the progression toward the global community.

- Posting things bi-lingually -- particularly high-level material like a tech blog -- are just enabling those standing in the way of progress, and are contributing to the problem. 

In all honesty, that's a bit elitist isn't it? I mean, I'm all for more people learning English, it's not my native language but it makes communication across the world easier as you said, but just because it makes it easier doesn't mean we should discard everything else?

If a blog written in English would reach 50 people, with the remaining 25 people not understanding it, surely it's a win-win situation for the blogger to reach those remaining 25 if he or in Iris' case she knows the language? With Iris being Swedish, I suppose it doesn't matter much, considering that most Swedes (especially those with an interest in coding/tech) will be quite good at english, but I think it's terribly wrong to generalize and claim that the world, even the "internet world", would be a better place if everyone spoke english. By that logic, we should all learn Mandarin since for every English speaker there's likely to be a Mandarin speaker too. 

For us to become a global one-creation common or joint possession, we must all articulate the same tongue. 

Nice post