Ex-patriate Experience: It’s twice as hard in your second language

I’d honestly never given much thought to immigrants. I mean, sure, I realized that it must be hard to move away from your family, friends and everything familiar. I assumed doing business in your second language was hard.

But I never realized how hard it really was until being thrown in the situation myself.

Everything takes twice as long. Reading an email, I often find myself looking up words in a Spanish dictionary. Answering the email, I often use the English — Spanish translation from Google , but then I still have to double-check certain words because that is such a literal translation. For example, “statistics is a field of mathematics” might be translated as “statistics is a farm of mathematics”.

If it’s just something simple like responding to a meeting request, Google translate + my knowledge of Spanish + a Spanish dictionary might be good enough, but if it’s something more important, say, a contract or a proposal, after I have written it in English and then translated it to Spanish, I send it to someone else to proof-read.

Wouldn’t it be simpler to write it in Spanish to begin with? Not for me. That would take even longer. I still think in English almost all of the time.