How this site works

Either there is idea or a project being in works, internally I maintain and write notes all in English, with terminology from datasheets and application notes, design files and such. It’s just make things so much easier to keep common language across everything around. Usually there are much more than 10 projects in the flow each month, so maintenance and work-log tracking has to be efficient and transparent to me. After project is evolved to details large enough to be a benefit for readers, it get posted as article or a worklog, sometimes YouTube video on xDevs.com channel.

And since almost all documentation is purely in technical English language, there is no choice to be made. Most of professional and electronics makers have to understand and be able to read English just to be able of reading thru component datasheets and manuals of the tools they use. I realize there are many people who’s English is not native language (just as myself too), and publication in foreign language might be difficult to read quickly, so decision to expand language support was made.

Why I thought multi-language site would benefit and switched to it?

According to site stats, about 15% of xDevs.com visitors are russian-speaking. Since my mother tongue is Russian, decision late 2015 was made to have content, like articles, guides and repair worklogs done multilingual, in both languages I speak, English as primary and Russian as secondary, with manual translation and rewriting all text content. I thought that would work, considering online lack of specific content I’m interested in languages other than English.

So I was under impression that by having both locales online I’d be able to cover wider audience and make understanding of articles easier and more comfortable.

Why it did not work?

It’s just too much pain and work involved, and with my current schedule of working on site few hours a day in best cases, it’s just not working. Currently there are 146 articles (either public or hidden), many of which constantly updated and refined as projects evolve and there is no physical possibility for me to work on both languages at once, making it 292 articles.

At current state of things I would rather invest time and resources to make more different and new content and projects, than translating articles into language which less than 15% visitors might benefit. Sorry for cold math, but this is the fact I’m switching back to single language across whole https://xdevs.com site.

Plans for future

Perhaps with larger public support and interest from readers there will be possible to cover some of the hot topics in Russian. I don’t know this yet, and have no plans of doing it, but if there is public demand and/or bi-lingual readers who might be interested into contributing to project, we might find a way to work things out for benefit of both of us and xDevs.com as a educational project.

If you have comments or different vision – feel free to start a discussion.