I recently set up a small blog on GitHub Pages. It was almost effortless—pick a theme, tweak a few parameters, and the site is live. Since I was already tinkering, I decided to make it bilingual. Every post now starts in Chinese, then gets translated into English with the help of an AI model.
The quality of machine translation today is, frankly, impressive. Most of the time, a light round of editing is enough before publishing.
And yet, something never quite sits right.
The sentences are correct. The meaning is intact. But the text feels… distant. As if there’s a thin layer between the words and the reader—hard to name, harder to ignore.
That unease sharpened one day when I worked on a longer piece. The translated version felt particularly off. So I did a side-by-side comparison of several posts, Chinese against English. The result was unsettling—like catching your reflection in a mirror and realizing, for a split second, that it isn’t you.
It brought to mind an old line of poetry about crossing a threshold and becoming a stranger ever after:
Once you enter the noble’s gate, it’s as deep as th sea; from then on, the former love is but a stranger.
The problem, I realized, wasn’t the translation. It was the Chinese.
For years, I’ve worked in environments where English is the default. Emails, documentation, code, comments—everything happens in English. Chinese never disappeared, but it retreated into casual conversation: chats, messages, everyday exchanges.
Looking back at my recent blog posts, I noticed something uncomfortable. The Chinese and the English versions aligned almost word for word. On the surface, they were written in Chinese. But structurally, they followed English logic so closely that they could be mapped directly onto each other.
Somewhere along the way, I had developed a habit. Whenever I “write,” my thoughts take a detour through English before landing in Chinese. What I had taken for Chinese writing was, in fact, English composition wearing Chinese characters.
No wonder it reads like a translation.
I suspect I’m not alone in this.
For many bilingual speakers, written expression gradually leans toward English. Chinese recedes into speech, rarely called upon for sustained, complex thought. And like any skill left unused, it begins to dull.
You don’t notice it at first. Only when you try to write something serious do you realize the words no longer come as easily.
Use it, or lose it.
In an odd way, this blog has been a wake-up call. It forced me to see the problem clearly. And the solution, though simple, is not easy: start writing in Chinese again—deliberately, persistently, and with attention.
As I write this, I find myself examining each sentence as it forms:
Could this be translated directly into English?
If the answer is yes, something is probably off.