Translated pages: Spanish, Portuguese, German and French drafts

Most visitors reach the site from the United States and the United Kingdom. Translated pages are the first step toward reaching people who read Spanish, Portuguese, German and French.

What is built

• Eleven pages per language, each at its own address: the home page, About, Work, Projects, Community, Schedule, Live, Links, Press, the privacy policy and the terms, under /es/, /pt-br/, /de/ and /fr/.
• A language list in the footer of those pages, linking each page to the same page in every other language.
• Each translated page is rendered from the finished English page, so it can never fall behind it: a sentence with no translation yet stays in English instead of going missing. Translations are matched sentence by sentence, and a translated sentence must keep the same links and emphasis as the English one or it is not used.
• The title, description, sharing preview and structured data are translated too, and each page names its own language and address.
• Text that scripts write after the page loads is translated as well: the live Discord status, the Mello Zone member count, the rotating social feed headings and the feed labels.
• Long words in big headings break at a syllable with a hyphen, at points set for each language, instead of wherever the line runs out.
• The privacy policy and terms say at the top that the English version prevails if a translation differs.

Changelog and blog entries stay in English. The media kit is left out for now, because its figures and sentences change every day.

What is not live yet

All four languages are drafts. They are built only for review and are not part of the published site. Each one goes live only after Sammy approves it, and stays out of search results until someone fluent in it has read it: search engines treat unreviewed machine translation as low-quality content.

Verification

• tools/test-i18n.mjs, part of npm run test:built, renders every page in every language. It checks:
  • every translation keeps its sentence’s links and emphasis;
  • every link to a translated page stays in the same language;
  • each page declares its language, address and sharing locale;
  • each page is kept out of search results until its language is approved;
  • the language list is complete;
  • the sentences scripts write are still the ones the scripts use;
  • an approved language cannot go live with untranslated sentences.
• tools/test-site-chrome.mjs checks the header and footer of every translated page, including links that point to the same language.
• The accessibility, text-fit and theme checks now also load every translated page the preview serves. Translated text runs longer than English, and the first text-fit pass found 97 places where a long word split inside a heading or a decorative label pushed past a phone screen. All were fixed, and text now fits on all 44 translated pages at every width, including with larger text, wide spacing and the readable font.
• Pages in each of the four languages were reviewed by eye at desktop, tablet and phone widths. That review found one more problem, a card title on the Links page running into its arrow, which is fixed in every language.