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Background: I'm a undergraduate student who is planning on going out to Canada to do my master’s.

Since I'll be applying to universities there I'm stuck thinking if writing my research thesis in Lithuanian might diminish my chances of getting into good universities.

Are there any pros of me writing the thesis in English?

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Writing in English will make your work accessible to more people. Otherwise translation would be needed.

Eventually you will probably want to publish in a more common language, but you can fairly easily avoid issues in the short term by writing your CV in such a way that you provide the original titles of papers/theses along with English translations.

One advantage of writing originally in English, provided it is grammatically correct, is that it will be easier to convince people in admissions that you are conversant in English, which will be needed most places in Canada and everywhere in US.

Note that in some fields, auto translation like Google Translate does a terrible job; math, for example. It may be better in other fields with a bit less technical terminology.

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  • Google Translate does a terrible job; math, for example --- It's a lot better than it used to be, which I'm sure you know, but I thought you might be amused with the types of translations my early uses of google translate gave. Here's a made up example, but the actual examples were just as bad: "every segmented lower whole is surrounded" for what should have been "every measurable subset is bounded". And no, this isn't intended to be a realistic assertion that one might expect to encounter in measure theory -- I just made something up for illustrative purposes.
    – Dave L Renfro
    Commented Sep 17, 2022 at 18:46
  • Is there any field of any human activity where Google Translate does not do a terrible job? Or is it better when translating stuff into English? When I am being forced (by Google) to read stuff like app description auto-translated from English, it is all just garbage.
    – Vladimir F Героям слава
    Commented Sep 17, 2022 at 18:59
  • @VladimirFГероямслава, my guess (just a guess) is that philosophy or history might be reasonable with a bit of tweaking. I use it here to translate questions presented in other languages and it works for that because there is little technical jargon.
    – Buffy
    Commented Sep 17, 2022 at 19:25

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