My experience of writing a multilingual essay mostly felt like I had bitten off way more than I can chew. While I can speak 6 South African Languages, I am only able to read and write 3 in the most basic/beginners’ level. Being tasked with writing a multilingual essay, the first thing that I noticed when writing my essay is that speaking a language or having a language repertoire is very easy, but writing in the language is a completely different story.
As a starting point, I wrote my essay in English and then selected parts of it to translate to the different languages I had selected. I had to rely on Google translate and the help of family and friends who were more skilled in writing the languages I had chosen to include in my essay to help with more accurate translations. It was a rude awakening as I had no idea on basic sentence structures for most of the selected languages which made me doubt my actual multilingual skills at the time. However, despite this I decided to take a leap of faith and trust the learning process, as this was not just a challenge for me, but also to the lecturer who would be marking this paper. It was a major challenge which took me out of my comfort zone. However, it has helped me develop my knowledge of languages, as there were words/phrases which I have learnt from this experience. I was very intentional when I selected this course (Multilingual Learning and Teaching) as I wanted to enhance my multilingual skills and get the opportunity to learn about something I am deeply passionate about. So when I was given the platform to play around with assignments and write them in different languages, I went with it, as this was the first time ever I got to positively show off being multilingual.
A key take out from this essay would be knowing how to speak a language is great but going the extra mile to learn to read and write the language is even better, as it sharpens your knowledge more, especially if you are a language lover like me. I enjoyed the challenge even though I was skeptical about submitting at first since I was not as confident in the translations but opened myself up to learning and growing from whatever feedback I will get from this experience. It is tasks like these that make me excited to see where the future of multilingual learning will go and how I can be a contributor to it being a success one day.
Written by Sesethu Siloti, PGDip Language Practice Student, Multilingual Learning and Teaching Module UWC.
30 April 2026
