Hello!

I’m thinking about what to write in this post both in English and Romanian at the same time and I already know I’m going to have issues trying to send the same message in multiple languages, but I guess that’s the point of the post, after all. I know that most bloggers write in English to be more appealing to the majority of the people living now on Earth, while some others just write in their mother tongue, be it English, French, or any other, because their readers are geographically closer. I think the first time I experienced losing meaning in translation was while watching the Notre Dame de Paris musical some 20 years ago (it’s still my favourite musical!) and laughing that the phrase “entre chien et loup” was translated literally to “between dog and wolf” (Ro: “între câine și lup”), when it was actually an idiom for “at dusk”, because at that time in the day, one can’t see the difference. I did write a lot in Romanian back in the day, until 2012 or so, but since I’ve actively restarted to write here, a lot has changed both in my life and in the blogosphere, now my audience is no longer concentrated in Romania.

And although two individuals coming from different countries or backgrounds can share a common language, there are many occasions where language is a tool so strong that is builds more walls than bridges, because it can restrict your access to knowledge, culture, art or people and their ideas. Big companies like Youtube and Netflix often restrict content based on geolocation schemes, putting another wall between the reader and the information. For example, if you’re a Romanian person living in the Western Europe, you cannot see on Netflix the Romanian movies that you can see while you’re in Romania. So you’re going to recommend to friends some things that they could never have access to, unless they physically go there. Kind of dumb, since we’re living in the digital age, even with the existence of VPNs. So if you’re running a blog, a website, a company or a community, don’t lock people out just based on where the others are, like staples.com does for visitors coming from the European Union.

At work, on forums, reading blogs, chatting on IRC channels or playing World of Warcraft, I had the occasion to meet wonderful people from all over the world, exploring their culture, music, movies, books, ideas, role models, superstars and legends, and this helped expand my horizons beyond my imagination. The World Wide Web is getting wider every day, and after all it’s just a personal choice of being multilingual in this infinite space. You can talk English, Japanese, even Klingon if you want, it’s all up to personal choice, and at some point it’s not even about the language at all. It’s about understanding who your audience is and if you care about spreading your message, your culture and your knowledge beyond some borders that were arbitrarily set by some kings on a map two thousand years ago.

So instead of philosophising too much about what means to be multi-lingual on the Internet, I think it’s best I share the advice of being yourself and learn to look past the horizon, because the things you might discover might be wonderful. Keeping the mind open keeps the Internet open.

Thank you!