Maintaining a multilingual blog is hard

This is my submission for the March 2025 IndieWeb Carnival (first timer!), hosted by Pablo Morales. The theme is “Self-Expression” — if you happen to be reading this, you should totally submit something too!

The Different Versions of Me

I’m fluent in three languages: Chinese, English, and Japanese. Each one reveals a different facet of who I am.

In English—ironically a language I hated my entire childhood because I was forced to learn it as a kid. Due to my disdain for it, I never was good at it despite having an international school education that was primarily in English. Outside of my classes, I tried to speak in Chinese whenever I could. I only started to appreciate English in my 20s after reading useful books (books that are finally not Chinese fantasy novels or Japanese manga) for the first time. Now it has became the language of my education and professional life—Stanford, Meta, /r/iOSProgramming. When I write in English, I unconsciously hope to adopt a casual yet authoritative voice, trying to be more helpful. It’s the voice shaped by countless productivity books and business articles I’ve consumed over the years.

In Chinese, my native language, an entirely different person emerges. I’m way way more conversational and casual. My sentences flow with tonal particles like “啦” and “啊” because this is what I use growing up, while talking to family and friends. I tell jokes I wouldn’t think to tell in English. I reference childhood TV shows that would make no sense to an English-speaking audience. When I write in Chinese, I don’t second-guess my word choices—it’s just me, talking to you. Interestingly, I have to switch back to English when it comes to technical terms because I learned math, science and productivity books all in English.

And then there’s Japanese, my third language. Here, I transform into someone more reserved, more careful. After studying for over a decade, my Japanese still isn’t at native level. I stick to simpler sentence structures I mastered in classrooms, occasionally dropping in phrases from anime or manga that impressed my Japanese friends. In Japanese, I’m still performing rather than just being.

The different expressions come from the different content I consume and the different environments I’m used to using them in.

I’m not three different people—but I do have three different expressions of myself.

The Ambitious Blog That Was Doomed to Fail

Being a trilingual, earlier this year, I convinced myself of what seemed like a brilliant idea: I’d write my blog in both Chinese and English, with plans to eventually add Japanese. With AI translation tools advancing so rapidly, I figured the overhead would be minimal—maybe 30 minutes per post to review and polish the other language, while I can attract 3x the audience! I would be able to reach different people who might be interested in me!

Oh boy, was I wrong.

It’s such a massive overhead to maintain content in two languages.

First, I don’t have a clear process. I sometimes write first in English and sometimes in Chinese. But translation in either direction requires entirely different work, and the result varies dramatically depending on which language I started with. There’s also the unnecessary decision fatigue: should I write first in English or Chinese?

Beyond that, a good translation isn’t just about swapping words—it’s about cultural context, references, and tone.

I’m not a writer but more of a producer and editor, so I have no problem with AI helping me write my ideas more succinctly and remove my awful grammatical errors as a non-native speaker—they’re still my ideas. But the translations into Chinese are another story. Even using Claude Sonnet 3.7 with detailed prompting, it often uses word choices for Simplified Chinese instead of Traditional Chinese. And regardless of how I prompt it, the tone never sounds like me. I end up rewriting from English line by line. Every single post becomes a cultural adaptation project. It’s exhausting!

Meanwhile, I’m already struggling with the most basic blogging challenge: consistency. I’m a beginner blogger drowning in:

• Limited discipline (did I mention I wanted to blog but haven’t done so in decades?)
• Scarce time (two young kids will do that to you)
• A tendency to procrastinate (watching mindless YouTube videos is WAY easier than writing something meaningful)

My original goal was weekly posts in two languages. Then bi-weekly. Reality check: I’ve been lucky to post monthly in one language.

The Parallels with App Development

You know what? This whole multilingual blog struggle reminds me of a painful lesson I learned with my app. When I launched the v2.0 version of MARU: Easy Japanese, I got super excited and made the ambitious (okay, let’s be real—totally reckless) decision to translate it into 25 languages.

I was so pumped about it! My thinking was: “Even if just ONE user in Hungary or Greece buys my app, it’s totally worth it!”

Doing that initial translation wasn’t actually that hard. And yeah, it did bring in more revenue, which was nice. But now? Ugh. Every tiny feature I add needs translation into 25 languages. Even something as simple as adding a “Continue” button requires 25 different translations—which is absolutely soul-crushing when you’re just trying to ship something quickly.

As a one-person company (aka just me in my pajamas), I also end up handling customer support for ALL those languages using Google Translate. Sometimes it’s hilarious, sometimes it’s exhausting, but it’s always extra work I didn’t fully consider when I was in that initial excitement phase.

I eventually had to cut it down to 20 languages—but even then, I couldn’t go any lower because, well, I had actual users in those languages. Lesson learned. Now? I’m sticking to three at most. Or maybe eight to cover the European countries if I’m feeling reckless again. See my dilemma? 🤷‍♂️

All the business advice books say the same thing: focus on ONE thing first. Amazon didn’t start by selling everything under the sun—they sold books. Instagram wasn’t this massive social empire from day one—it was just a simple photo app. But did I listen? Nope! And now I’m dealing with the consequences.

The Moment of Clarity

So last month, I’m sitting there staring at my messy Obsidian blog post folder, feeling pretty bad about myself. I had these three half-finished posts—two in Chinese, one in English—both just collecting digital dust. Neither was getting published because I couldn’t find time to finish versions for BOTH languages. They just sat there on my screen, basically mocking me and my grand ambitions.

Have you ever had that moment when you suddenly realize you’ve been making your life way harder than it needs to be? That’s what happened.

It hit me like a ton of bricks: I was letting perfect be the enemy of done. Classic Alex problem!

What’s my blog really for, anyway? It’s not supposed to be some amazing site that has content everyone (who reads in English, Chinese, and Japanese) should follow. It’s just supposed to be a place where I record my thoughts before they vanish from my brain (which happens constantly these days—blame the kids). It’s basically an extended business card for people who want to know more about me (probably coming from my apps).

Sure, building an audience would be cool, but honestly? That’s secondary to just CREATING something and putting it out there.

Ten posts in one language are WAY better than five posts in two languages. Duh! Why did it take me so long to see that?

My Adjusted Content Strategy for Sustainability

After much overthinking (my specialty, especially at nights), here’s what I’ve decided:

1. Start in Chinese first, then expand. Focus on getting stuff out in one language. When I write something particularly awesome in Chinese—and if I’m feeling inspired and not just desperate to play video games—I can summarize it in English. Maybe once per quarter if I’m being realistic.

2. Monthly posts instead of weekly. Let’s be honest, I was never going to post weekly. Monthly I can handle. If I somehow manage bi-weekly posts, I’ll give myself a gold star and extra screen time.

3. Keep it short and sweet. Shorter posts are easier to edit, publish, and maybe translate someday. Nobody needs my rambling 3,000-word manifestos anyway, right? Get to the point and move on with life.

I’m trying to view this whole blogging thing as a marathon instead of a sprint. It doesn’t have to be perfect right away. This approach simplifies everything and lets me focus on what actually pays the bills—building apps—while still having fun writing without the pressure.

The Self-Expression Paradox

So what does this all have to do with self-expression, anyway? Well, it’s kind of funny—by trying to express myself perfectly in multiple languages, I was actually expressing myself LESS because I wasn’t publishing anything!

There’s a stupidly simple truth I had to learn the hard way: sometimes accepting your limitations actually gives you more freedom, not less.

This is totally a first-world problem for multilingual people, isn’t it? Maybe one downside of knowing multiple languages is the paradox of choice. It’s like how my old boss Mark Zuckerberg—whom I’ve only got to admire from a very far distance—used to wear the same clothes every day to avoid wasting brain power on trivial decisions. (Sadly, he doesn’t do that anymore, but hey, I’m trying to adopt the habit myself—maybe a topic for another post, in Chinese.) Maybe if I only knew one language, all these annoying friction points would just… disappear.

That said, I still love knowing multiple languages and exploring different cultures. I wouldn’t trade that for anything, even if it makes blogging more complicated! Learning new languages have opened new doors for me (i.e. thousands of websites on the internet).

So this is probably the last English post I’ll publish for a while (except for those drafts I’ve already written but got stuck translating into Chinese). And that’s perfectly fine. Accepting my constraints—limited time, energy, and focus—is also a form of self-expression.

It’s just me admitting: “Hey, this is who I actually am right now, not who I wish I could be.” And there’s something refreshingly honest about that. And if that sounded too cheesy, yes, I’ve been reading a lot of Oliver Burkeman lately.