Building a Bilingual Newsletter: 2020 Edition

I’m taking a departure from my usual deep dive analysis to write this “under the hood” exploration of how I’ve been building this bilingual newsletter. I want to share some behind the scenes information, because I’ve always treated Interconnected as a product, not just a blog. Even though it is basically a blog at the moment, there are many things I plan to build on top of this foundation, and sharing the technology, thinking, design, and various experiments is a good way to keep myself honest and learn better in public. I plan to write a similar post like this every year going forward to share and track all the changes, new technologies I try, keep, abandon, as well as product ideas that are constantly floating in my head.

On another level, I’m motivated to share, because I hope it will help more people produce bilingual content and lubricate the information flow between two languages -- not just the English-Chinese pairing, but any pairing. As I noted (perhaps lamented) in my opening letter of last week’s Interconnected Weekly, there’s still so much that needs to be done to improve the information flow between the English and Chinese language world. The 16-days gap between Jack Ma giving his Bund Summit speech and my translating and publishing the speech is too long and too unreliable.

Tech Stack

I use Ghost as my publishing platform. It is a relatively new platform (started in 2013) that’s completely open sourced, just like its older brethren Wordpress (started in 2003). Ghost is built on the JAM stack (JavaScript, API, Markup), which is a hot and trendy way to build static websites that’s fast and lightweight.

I chose Ghost because: 1. I’ve had some experience customizing it when launching another blog called COSS Media (writings focused on the commercial open source ecosystem) last year; 2. I like its open source nature (versus its proprietary counterpart Medium), which gives me more control. As many of you know, I’m quite deep into open source and have written a lot about it, so it’s important to me to “eat my own dog food” too. Ghost also has built-in features for collecting subscribers and designing paid tiers, which I plan to use eventually. Of course, you can do all this in Wordpress too, but it’s typically done via plug-ins that end up bloating the website and degrade load speed -- something I want to avoid in order to give all readers a good experience, wherever they are on our planet. Fast load speed helps with SEO too.

It’s not all smooth-sailing with Ghost. Being a young platform, it has plenty of bugs and rooms for improvement. It currently lacks some table stakes features, like email open rate, forwarding tracking, and basic analytics around email interactions with subscribers. I have chosen not to obsess over these metrics for now, because it tends to take my focus away from writing, bad for mental health, and Google Analytics is a sufficient enough substitute. All of these features are on Ghost’s roadmap, so I’m willing to be patient, for now.

Ghost also has some small issues that are not deal-breakers, just annoying. For example, it has a subscribers dashboard that generates a line chart to show growth (cool!) but there’s a bug that makes the line flat (sad...).

This is a known bug and tracked publicly on GitHub, which is standard practice for any open source software. In open source, you can’t hide your problems; you just have to deal with them, in public.

For my purpose, the best part about using Ghost is its choice of using Handlebar.js to do its frontend templating and rendering, which is an open source, mature JavaScript framework (first commit was in July 2010). Being open sourced, mature, and a bit boring (instead of new and flashy) is good, because I know there’s enough tutorials out there to help me do customization on my own. If I want something more complicated, I can easily find skilled developers. Going into building Interconnected, I knew providing a good bilingual reading experience would be a challenge, so customizability was key.

The initial version of Interconnected was an anchor tag hack that I cobbled together where readers who want to read the Chinese version will jump from a link at the top to the halfway point of the page where the Chinese part starts, but can’t jump back. It works but it’s far from ideal. During my research when writing “GPT-3: An Abstraction of Time vs Money”, I discovered that OpenAI’s blog has a nice toggle experience between the English and Chinese version of its charter. I already knew that OpenAI uses Ghost to publish content, so the toggle experience could definitely be replicated on Interconnected.

Instead of coding the improvement on my own, I decided to look for help to speed up progress. I ended up hiring a contractor, who is already familiar with Ghost’s various theme templates to do ad-hoc improvements on a project-by-project basis. In addition to building the bilingual toggle, this contractor also built the archive section and many UI improvements to make reading here more effective. The combined cost of these three improvements is less than $200.

Here are some best practices when working with remote contract developers: figure out exactly what you want first, down to the smallest details, before approaching anyone. Using contract developers can be very efficient and cost effective when there is a clear example to replicate, but they are not good (nor should they be) at designing and iterating on half-baked ideas with you. That’s also why, generally speaking, building a startup product with contract developers during its rapid prototyping and discovery phase is a bad idea.

In other words, contractors are good for cloning, not creating.

Bilingual Writing Process

I start every post in English first and usually get to a draft that is 85% done before starting on the Chinese version. In the beginning, I used Baidu Translate to turn the 85% done English version into a 50% done Chinese draft, before writing on top of it. I now use DeepL for the same purpose. I think DeepL is slightly better than Baidu Translate, but currently don’t have a strong opinion about either one; both work well done.

The process I apply to the Chinese version is what I call “trans-creating”, a term one of my former colleagues used, which I really like. It’s not a straight-up translation, but a re-creation in a different language. Because I’m the original creator of both, it’s not necessary to stay true to one version or the other -- the goal is to communicate ideas and information in the language they are being conveyed in, properly and naturally.

For example, the English version may contain certain companies, market concepts, and acronyms related to China that require additional context for the readers to understand, but are obvious for Chinese readers, thus the added background may be omitted in the Chinese version. Certain idioms and humor in the English version simply don’t translate well in Chinese, so the same part may be told in a more straightforward way in the Chinese version.

One surprising thing I discovered during this twice weekly “trans-creation” process is that writing the Chinese version actually helps improve the English version, because it more effectively exposes imprecisions, inaccuracies, and poorly written passages.

Writing is a draining process. Writing bilingually can be extra draining. And when you are drained, dumb mistakes and typos happen. (I loathe typos, because I think it’s the most disrespectful thing a writer can do to a reader.) To shore up quality, I hired an intern a couple of months ago, who is perfectly bilingual (much more so than me) to edit all my writings, plus doing additional research and product development projects. They (not a typo, but the preferred pronoun) also log all my mistakes along with examples of proper usage, so hopefully my own writing will improve over time.

I have been extra energized and motivated since this intern came on board; their contribution is immediate! I pay them a monthly stipend -- best money I’ve ever spent. (Treat your interns well!)

Future Product Improvements

Interconnected, as a product, still has a long way to go. While the English-Chinese toggle has made reading one specific post between the two languages better, the entire website is still more English-centric, which isn’t as friendly to my Chinese reading audience.

There are many multilingual websites out there, but most of them are corporate sites with limited content -- a form I find ill-suited for consuming long-form writing. There has to be a better design for bilingual and multilingual consumption. (If you have design ideas, please share them with me!)

Ghost’s built-in email template is also not flexible -- you cannot toggle or easily navigate between the two language versions, which is why I’ve started appending a message at the top of every email to guide my Chinese readers with the best way to consume my posts. (If you received this post via email, you would have seen it.) This is an area where I hope Ghost will offer more customizability. It’ll be the next big improvement I plan to tackle.

Lastly, I have plans to build more complex offerings on top of this foundation -- a community, a paid layer, a place for more interconnected, interdisciplinary knowledge exchange via multiple mediums, like audio, video, chat, and simulation games. Interconnected is a 10 year project for me; we are only in the 10th month.

I hope this “under the hood” post provides some useful information on how to build a bilingual newsletter -- an undertaking entirely doable and replicable by anyone. And I look forward to writing this post again a year from now and share the continuous evolution of Interconnected.

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