I publish in Russian and English, sometimes in French. Not translated versions of the same post: separately developed content for separate audiences. The distinction matters more than it sounds.
The translation trap
The common approach is to write once and translate. It is fast, and it is why multilingual content usually feels slightly off in at least one language.
Translation preserves the words. It rarely preserves rhythm, cultural subtext or the framing that made the original land. The translated version carries the argument and loses the recognition.
Why both audiences deserve original thinking
Each audience has a different relationship to your expertise. A Russian-speaking audience of expats shares a specific experience with you: navigating professional life in a foreign context, translating expertise across market boundaries.
An English-speaking audience typically has no shared context and evaluates the expertise on its own terms. The same observation can serve both. The entry point, the examples and the framing differ.
This is not twice the work. It is the same thinking deployed twice. The cognitive effort sits in forming the observation, and adaptation after that is much cheaper.
The voice problem
In your first language you write how you think. In a second language you write how you know you are supposed to sound. The gap between those is where multilingual content loses something.
The fix is not becoming a better writer in the second language, though that helps. It is locating your actual opinion before you write anything. When the thought is clear, language becomes a vehicle. When it is not, you are simultaneously trying to think and trying not to make mistakes. Separate the two steps.
The specific value of being multilingual
There is an audience that specifically wants to read someone operating across linguistic and cultural contexts: immigrants building businesses, international teams, professionals working across markets.
For them your multilingual presence is directly relevant, because you are demonstrating exactly what they need to do. Most experts publish in one language and treat the other as a side project, so genuine two-language operation stays rare.
On mixing languages
Mixing inside one post or one channel creates friction for most audiences. The reader who found you through English content is not prepared for Russian text, and the reverse holds too.
Separate channels or clearly labelled sections work better, at least until the mixing becomes an established part of your style and communicates something intentional about who you are.
What to expect
Building in two languages takes longer, not because it is twice as hard, but because you are running two slow-start accumulation curves at once.
At some point the audiences cross-pollinate: someone from one community shares you into the other, an English-speaking reader asks whether you post in Russian for a colleague. That is when the multilingual presence stops feeling like double effort and starts working as an advantage.