Yes, this is my first post on this blog in English. Recently, I faced an important dilemma. Should I stick to my local audience and keep communicating in Dutch or should I take grasp of all the opportunities that are crucial to the internet and take a global approach? This is a dilemma which is also an issue for every band with a presence on the internet. It’s absolutely great that, due the international aspect of internet, my band Colorless Green Ideas has fans in Russia, Brasil and China. But how should I communicate with them? If I always write and talk in English, what is the chance that I alienate my local audience and lose a part of my cultural authenticity? For authenticity is an important factor in the image of a music band.
A discussion about Twitter on Music Think Tank was the trigger for my considerations. People told me that I shouldn’t worry about local European or Belgian followers on Twitter and that I should think globally.
Fine, but the first problem is language. My mother tongue is Dutch, and not English (a problem many English natives don’t think about). Until recently I twittered in Dutch, because it’s easier for me to write witty, catchy status updates in Dutch. Not because I am awfully bad in English. I’m really very sensitive to good language and writing, and that’s why I feel that I cannot bring the subtleties which I master in Dutch writing into an English text.
The second thing is connectivity and authenticity. At this moment, most people who follow me, also speak Dutch. This is certainly true because I post my updates simultaneously to FaceBook and Twitter via Ping.fm. It’s a little bit ‘fake’ that I speak to them in English (which I do now, most of the time). Wouldn’t this make them to disconnect?
Some things are just too local for other people to understand. Last week I wrote the following comment “Hilke heeft stramme spieren van de boekenbeurs af te breken.” First I need a dictionary to translate this into English. I know “spieren” are “muscles”, but “stram”? In the dictionary I find “stiff joints” would be a good translation. But the sound and alliteration of “stramme spieren” is something I lose in the translation… What a pity! Next is “boekenbeurs”. This is a book fair, which has a really big appeal in my region. It is the biggest event for writers, publishers and book lovers in Flanders. Thus, in English this would be “Stiff joints after taking down the book fair”. But this is completely pointless. In the Dutch version this makes people curious, because Boekenbeurs is something they can relate to and they’ll wonder what I was doing there (As a matter of fact, my employer, a small organisation for writers, had an nice stand there, an oriental hotel searching voor 1001 love letters. I helped taking down all the boards of the construction and carrying al the stuff into the van).
Another example is a blogpost I wrote some time ago on my band’s blog. It was about how I should approach people who I just meet on the street to talk them about my music. I wrote that I regularly travel by train and use the metro and I mentioned some specific geographical data, which make sense for people who live in my region. The main theme of the post was how I recognize the people who could be interested in my music. Can I pick them out just by judging their clothes and looks? I talked about a girl who sat in front of me in the train. She didn’t seem to be the right type, but might this be a misjudgement? I wrote she was reading a comic based on ‘De Avonden’ by Gerard Reve, a very famous novel in Dutch literature, and afterwards she glanced through a catalogue of Mango, a clothing store. And that detail made the whole picture: she was the type of girl that wore clothes by Mango, a brand that I don’t relate to drum’n'bass, the type of music I make.
To sum up, I wrote an engaging (I hope at least) story about this girl on the train and put some details in it that gave it an authentic flavor, made it a human episode from my real life, embedded in my own environment and cultural background. Obviously, I mentioned some data (Antwerp, Groenplaats, Gerard Reve, Mango) that are only comprehensible for people who share my cultural background and don’t make much sense for an international audience. Should I have written the blogpost in English? No, it wouldn’t make much sense. But then, how can I engage with those few fans in Slovenia, the UK and Brasil?
To conclude, this is my dilemma: should I address an international audience and write things that cannot go as deep into elements of my specific environment, culture, etc.? Or should I stick to my local, Dutch-speaking core audience, where I can show more authenticity, linguistic cleverness and relate to ‘insider’s information’?
I decided that in the near future I will experiment with both to see what the results might be. From now on, I mostly twitter in English. On this blog I will keep writing in Dutch for my Dutch-speaking audience, but sometimes I will write English posts (in the category ‘English’) on matters that have an ‘international’ relevance, like this very post you are reading now.
Just give me some time to reorganize the RSS feeds as a result of this new approach. In the meantime you can spin around your thoughts on this subject matter in the comments. How do you solve the dilemma between a global approach and cultural authenticity?
