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Discussion on: What makes you choose the language you write your articles in?

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Diana Coman

The content really - languages are not just words+grammar but also the full cultural context accumulated over the years. So if I'm writing in English, I have easy bridges to one set of cultural artefacts, while if I write in Romanian or in French, to other sets. For this reason, the content pretty much dictates the choice - while it's certainly possible to write the same thing in any language that I know well enough, some of those "writings" will inevitably be more "translations" than direct writing and some will involve more additional explanations to bridge the gap as it were. Note that neither of those is "bad" in itself - arguably it's precisely this sort of "translation" that cross-fertilizes but if my aim is simply to express a thought rather than specifically to enrich one cultural space with artifacts from another then I'll just go for the "closest" language to the content.