Some things don’t translate. Not because related words don’t exist, but because they don’t carry the same meaning.
When I started working on the bilingual version of the site, it all seemed simple. Reflections, personal essays, day-to-day observations, artwork descriptions. I write something in one language, ask my AI agent for an automatic translation, make a few adjustments here and there, and the meaning survives.
The problem started when I got to technical writing. Try translating “deploy” into Portuguese. Implantação? Nobody says that. Brazilian colloquialism had already solved this problem long before I came along. We just don’t translate it. Any developer will say “vou fazer o deploy”, or worse, “vou deployar”, without blinking, the English noun walking into the Portuguese sentence as if it belongs there. If we translated it to implantação, it would kill the meaning entirely. Nobody would understand.
But the challenge isn’t just vocabulary. I’ve been thinking about technical topics in English for so long that the concepts in Portuguese don’t exist in my head anymore. Some of them never did.
What I didn’t expect from all this was to re-adopt Portuguese as my primary language for writing. And that happened after I noticed that if I write the Portuguese version first, the translation barely needs any adjustments. The reverse isn’t true. The Portuguese translation is understandable, but it sounds strange, almost like it was generated by a machine. Because it was.