December 5. Stages of bilingualism: I’ve had the German version and the English version of this blog open in separate tabs next to each other for quite a while now, with the DeepL translation engine in a tab between them. I used to write in German first, then use DeepL to give me a rough cut of an English translation which I would hand-polish before publishing. Now I’m increasingly drawn to the English tab first. I can write simpler, more direct, with less heavy words in that tab. But I won’t use DeepL to give me a first cut of German. That’s just unbearable. I will copy over the English entry into the German file, and then do the German translation below it, from scratch. That sounds at least somewhat like me.