My background
I'm a native French speaker and a software engineer, I studied in French and grew up speaking French.
My Question is: which language should I use for my technical blog posts?
On one hand, French could be easier for me to write in. It can allow me to make a difference by transferring knowledge from English to the French speaker for my country.
Cons: much less audience and I always think that the beauty of computer science or technology can only be viewed in English.
On the other hand English:
It's a bit harder for me to write a blog in (I have written 2 blogs in 6 months) and I'm afraid that not mastering the language could hold me back many times.
But with English, I could target much larger audience and improve my writing skills.
What language should I write my programming blog post in?
Answer
Which language do the French use when they search programming related information on the web?
My mother tongue is German, but when I search information on the web on topics that aren't specific to my country (such as German law or German movies) I invariably search in English, expecting to find more and better information. This is especially true for questions relating to science and engineering, where the common language is English.
The French seem to use English on the internet just as much as the German. For example, there are about as many visits to Stack Overflow per thousand inhabitants from France (19) as there are from Germany (24).
So which language will help your blog to get found?
Who is your audience?
Do you write for professional or aspiring professional programmers? They all know English.
Or do you write for beginners or amateurs, explaining basics to non-experts, introducing younger teens or older adults to software-related issues? They all prefer French.
What do you want most from your blog?
Do you want to network within the French developer community? Do you want the largest possible audience? Do you want to learn English, because you want to work for an international company, or do you want to enhance your writing skills in French, because you want to earn money as a writer for French publications?
Make a list of your blog-related goals and order them by long-term relevance. See how each goal can be better achieved by writing in English versus French.
Can you write in English?
Well, sure you can write in English, but can you write well enough that mistakes you make don't put off readers?
English might have a larger audience, but English also has a larger number of competitors, many of which write elegantly in their mother tongue. How do you feel yourself about blogs written in broken English by some Russian or Chinese blogger? Do linguistic mistakes grate on you?
How quickly do you expect to become fluent enough in your English so writing in English doesn't take much more time than writing in French?
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