Hello, everypony!
The time has come. The first article in English is here, even though I previously promised I will always keep this blog in Czech language. Why the sudden change? What will happen next? Let's talk about it.
Since I created my filly.crystal instagram in November 2020, I've received many kind and loving messages from people across the world, telling me how happy they are to see more Filly fans like me. More and more Filly collectors has been coming to my profile, it felt like my instagram became a lighthouse for the Filly community. That's why me and Moji created the discord server Filly World; to unite our community of Filly collectors.
And yet it still didn't feel like enough.
Multiple people have told me that they would love to read my articles and showed genuine interest in them, but my blog si not well accessible for them when it comes to the language. And although I've already said in the article "14 years of blogging" that I'm working on my blog mostly for myself and not for others, it made me think: Is that the right mindset? Shouldn't I make my blog useful for others too? Is there anything else I can do for the small Filly community?
I asked my instagram followers and 14 of them agreed that they would love to read my articles in English. That's a lot of feedback.
For so many years I thought that nobody would read my articles anyway and that I would be just wasting my time translating everything. But now that more people actually expressed interest in my blog content and called my articles useful, I reconsidered.
I never aimed for big amount of readers, but I did wish to make my blog helpful to at least one person. And since the Filly community is so small, I think it's important to share as much info as possible with other collectors and make the content understandable for everyone, not only for Czech and Slovak readers. Yes, I had a translate button on my blog for a while now, but let's be honest - it doesn't work that well (especially when "koníčky" means both "little horses" and "hobbies", and so my whole blog is full of "Filly hobbies" when you try to translate it xD).
One of the reasons why I didn't want to write in English was the tradition of writing in Czech since 2011. I thought that by changing the language, I would disrupt the connection between this new blog and it's previous version on blog.cz. Now I see that the tradition isn't in the language I write in, but in sharing my experience in collecting and making friends along the way. The only thing that has changed is the "source" of my friends - nowadays I don't make new friends only in my own country, but around the globe! And therefore my blog should be accommodated for that.
Not to mention that writing in a different language will improve my skills. In the past few months I've been speaking in English everyday, so maybe writing in English won't be that much of a problem to me anymore.
So yeah, that's the final answer: from now on Filly Crystal will be kept in English language. Starting from today, which is also my 25th birthday, yipee! I guess I'm finally a big girl, haha.
Obviously it will take some time to change everything (including menu, wishlist and description of the blog). I won't be translating my old articles, maybe except for one in Koňostalgie section. Sadly this Czech pun doesn't make any sense in English, because it is a combination of "koně" (=horses) and nostalgia, therefore I can't fully translate the name of the series and I'll just keep it this way. I'll translate the article though, because I want to continue in the series and I think the beginning of the article is quite interesting when it comes to first "proto Fillies" being sold in Czech Republic.
Anyway, that's all I wanted to say. I hope you'll enjoy this change, any feedback is appreciated!
~Eliška Poníková
