As a Multilingual Blogger, you should focus on one language

A Multilingual blogger probably thinks that the language skills have to be used in every single moment. Nothing can be more wrong!

It’s a gift in life to know various languages, but you need to know how to take advantage of this golden nugget.

With language skills come communication, and the more people you can communicate with, the bigger your circle will be of people you interact with. 

When starting my blog in early 2016, the idea was to keep one English page and another one in Spanish. Latin-America is a huge market and where Spanish is the predominating language.

During a year, my blog was bilingual, English, and Spanish. As a multilingual blogger, I was proud of keeping it up in two different languages. However, the workload was enormous. To fulfill my promise with a new article every fifth day (something I have done since the very beginning,) there was almost no time left to do something else but blogging.

So, one day doing some brainstorming with myself, the question came up why I don’t blog in Swedish, which is my mother tongue?

“But all Swedish people know English,” was my quick response.

Indeed, a much bigger group of people in Latin-America doesn’t speak English. Still, as a multilingual blogger, I had to recognize something interesting.

Most of the Latin-American people interacting with my blog, they all know English.

Multilingual Blogger or Not, English is The Language of The Internet.

The relatively quiet but fast and irrevocable change in our society is getting more viral every day. To a high degree, your connection highly depends on how you can communicate with the environment where you are active.

Every serious entrepreneur knows how important it is to have a blog. The blogging activity around the world is increasing daily. Since blogging started seriously some 20 years ago, the activity is continually changing and fine-tuning.

From being a multilingual global forum, today, every serious blogger knows that English is a must if you want to rank your blog in the so important search engines on the web.

A lot of people not having English as their native language, through in the towel and accept the defeat, when the truth is that you actually can take advantage of your multilingual skills.

How to Get Rid of The Fear

If English isn’t your native language, you don’t need to dominate English in a perfect way to get started with your blogging. By the way, what is perfect?

Your audience isn’t reading your blog post to correct your language. Forget about the fear we all had in school when the language teacher was correcting your homework. Your audience is reading your post for an entirely different reason.

They search for appropriate content, and when reading your post, they have found something that may be the solution to a problem they have. The phrase, “Content is King,” you have probably heard several times. And that is what it’s all about. Have you ever seen something like: “Spelling or grammar is King”?

By now, you might notice that English isn’t my native language. It’s not even my second language but the third. I consider my English grammar and spelling reasonably good. Still, if English is your mother tongue, you might notice nuances and particular vocabulary, indicating that I’m not an English native speaker.

So what?

The reason why you read this text right now is that you have found a piece of content that could be of interest to you.

Dear multilingual blogger colleagues around the globe, turn off that “fear-button” immediately. Start sharing your experience and knowledge, which will be an appreciated contribution to the community where you hang out.

Unique Contributions by Multilingual People

If “Content is King,” then “Communication is Queen.”

Being multilingual is much more than just being able to talk several languages. It’s a fantastic way of diving into other cultures. And in today’s globalization, the understanding and interaction with different cultures, traditions, and customs, is a hidden advantage a lot of multilingual people do not use. Many multilingual individuals just underestimate the importance of having this unique diversity of cultural insight and understanding.

Doing business is all about trust. Knowing the “rules of the game” in other non-English-speaking countries will automatically give you an advantage compared to other actors in the market. Here you have a bonus card totally for free. Use that power!

Sometimes non-English bloggers write grammatically correct things, but no native blogger would write it like that. It could be that the phrase is totally out of date. It’s okay if you know somebody who can help you to point out such mistakes. Otherwise, don’t care about it! You are writing content and not giving a language lesson.

How to Improve as a Multilingual Blogger?

As an active blog writer, you need to train your skills continuously. That includes, of course, language training. Read and listen as much in English as you can. 

Personally, I sometimes read cartoons, and there are two reasons for that: 

1. If there is a word you don’t understand completely, often you can figure it out by taking a look at the picture.
2. A cartoon language could indeed give a heart attack to a member of a council to protect the English language. But the slang and wording used in a cartoon reflect quite well the way the language is spoken right now by average and ordinary people. A language develops and changes constantly.

Some years ago, when I was doing business in Brazil, I had to learn the language to be able to manage a business talk. I have to admit that having Spanish as my second language helped me considerably. But when sitting on a flight among other business people, they must have been wondering what kind of weird person I was reading Donald Duck. But thanks to the cartoons, I could manage the language quite well.

Emotions and facts

Do never “translate”! What do I mean by that? Write the blog post from the very first draft to the final post in English. Do not write it in your native language and then translate it. It will never be useful, as different languages use different ways of expressing the same thing.

For example, Latin languages are more emotional in their expressions, while Anglo-Saxon vocabularies have a tendency to express everything in a “strictly correct” and often a very “cold” way.

In our digitalized world, there are tons of various tools and applications you can use to help you to get your writing right. Do not rely totally on these tools, but pick a few that you really believe can support your work.

It’s easy to become an app freak when you start to scroll around and see what is available.

Personally, I use Grammarly, which is an excellent tool to make advanced spell checks and also grammar checks. Use it with a high level of criteria, and it could help you to bend out certain linguistic question marks.

As multilingual, we know that perfection is something very relative, or as Salvador Dalí said once:

“Have no fear of perfection, you’ll never reach it.” 

Writing good English is not something you either can do or can’t do. It’s an ongoing process that will never end. The advice is to write as much as possible. Practice will always bring you one step closer to perfection.

Then you will always come across phrases where your English and American readers will argue, which is the correct way of writing. But that is something to discuss in a future blog post.

How to Leave a Positive Footprint as a multilingual blogger

Congratulations if you consider yourself as a multilingual blogger. You have knowledge that can be used if you know how to act correctly.

Write in English and use your multilingual skills to dive into the habits, cultures, and rules that are hidden behind any language.

Content is indeed king, but to manage your language skills in such a manner that you will connect with people with small or even no language barriers at all will transform you into an emperor of an Internet relationship. Click here and get the only app you will need to be a multilingual professional.

Use it wisely, and your business will succeed with this multilingual approach.

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Jan O. Nilsson – Content is King and a Multilingual Blogger is Emperor ==Go to the top of page

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