Similarities and Differences Between Writing Essays in English and my Language

Essays are an universal method of communicating written information and they exist, in some form, for all languages we could imagine. I've been used to writing in English for the past few years but one of the difficulties I encountered when I first started this task was finding phrases, words and proverbs to make my writing understandable to readers. Spanish is my mother tongue and obviously finding common expressions that hispanic people are familiar with is infinitely easier, the challenge comes when finding ways to translate these common phrases because they either do not exist in another language or they are said in totally different ways. For example, in English we have the expression "Between a rock and a hard place" and in Spanish we say it "Entre la espada y la pared" (translates to: "Between the sword and the wall"). Although both phrases are common in English, Spanish-speakers (at least in Venezuela) have no idea of what "Between a rock and a hard place" means (roughly translated to "Entre una roca y un lugar dificil"), making it a little bit tricky on English learners to know the best way of saying common phrases in this language to make their writing more understandable in contrast to how they would say such expressions in their mother tongue.

This use of proverbs also leads to the use words and context. Words that are directly translated from Spanish to English don't always mean the same thing, and even if they do, chances are they are not used in the same way. For example, the word "vaina" translates to "sheath", however depending on which part of the globe your Spanish comes from, the word can either mean "sheath" or it can have an inappropiate connotation (this word in Venezuela has different meanings depending on the context and social class) which is the reason why it's rarely used in formal writing.

Structure-wise, essays in both English and Spanish are the same, as the standard method to coherently organize ideas is pretty much universal (at least in latin-derived languages), however, the most difficult part is changing the thought-processing between two different languages. Any person who's bilingual (or more than that) has to change the way he/she thinks to transition from one language to the other at the moment of speaking, and similarly, there has to be an adjustment at the time of writing. In my experience, Spanish has more rules regarding accentuation, sentence structure, punctuation and also considering that we have an extra letter in the alphabet ("ñ") leads us to having more words to use. It is fair to say that Spanish is less simple to write than English but for me it's all a matter of changing the language in which I speak to myself in my brain (if that makes any sense whatsoever) to make my writing feel more natural.

Other than the differences explained above, Spanish and English are not that distant when it comes to essay writing, however, a failure to look at these seemingly tiny variations can make this writing transition very difficult to almost impossible. I'm sure that there even more dramatic differences between English and other non-latin-based languages, nevertheless these points of view are written in base of the Spanish spoken in Venezuela from someone who's been familiarizing with American English for the last 5 years while other hispanic people from many parts of the world may have encoutered more differences because of their dialect, pronunciation, culture and various relevant factors.