Lately I've had the privilege to work with several clients who are bilingual from birth; that is, they were born and/or raised in the United States (or somewhere else where English is dominant) but their parents spoke another language with them at home. This is a gift for someone born in that environment (and I really wish I had been raised bilingual, but alas, my mixed ancestry did not allow for that!), but it can pose its own challenges when such a person starts writing academic work in one of those two first languages!
One challenge bilingual authors may face is that the syntax structures from the two languages (let's say English and Spanish for simplicity's sake) may mix with each other when the author is writing in one of those languages. Thus, their English may have Spanish-flavored syntax or their Spanish might use some unidiomatic, English-flavored syntax. As someone who learned Spanish as a teenager and has some bilingual-like characteristics (though I'm not truly bilingual from birth), I've noticed that when I have been speaking/writing in English for long periods, I often have difficulty code-switching and my written Spanish won't be completely fluent/free from English bleedthrough until I've been working in Spanish for awhile (maybe a couple hours). During my cruise ship performing tours, when I was trying to draft Spanish-language program notes for a new musical composition, I figured out that it was easiest for me to do so if I worked on them right after chatting with my Spanish-speaking friends on the ship for awhile (this wasn't hard to do, since my best friends on that ship were from Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico!). If you notice this in your own writing experience, then, you might try spacing out your writing schedule accordingly: rather than having a phone chat with a relative in your other first language and then immediately sitting down to write your latest dissertation chapter, try writing the chapter first (but also after you've been engaged with English for awhile, like by answering emails from your professors or watching an English-language TV show) and then calling your relative. You might see a real difference in what you produce! While this language mixing may never completely go away, depending on you and your brain wiring, you may want to try this experiment and see if it works for you.
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