ELK GameVerse is published in eight languages: English, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Hindi and Kiswahili. None of them is a translation layer bolted on afterwards — each has its own address, its own metadata and its own place in search results.
Each language has its own address
The language is the first part of every URL: /en/, /fr/, /de/, /es/, /ru/, /ar/, /hi/, /sw/. This page you are reading exists at eight addresses, one per language, and each of them tells search engines about the other seven.
It also means a link you send someone carries its language with it. Sharing a page with a friend who reads Kiswahili is a matter of sending them the /sw/ address; there is no setting they have to find first.
Switching
The language picker is at the foot of every page. It changes only the first part of the address, so you stay on the page you were reading — being sent back to the home page for changing language is the single most annoying thing a multilingual site does.
The language on your account is separate and quieter: it is the one the platform uses when it has something to say to you. You can browse in one language on a borrowed computer without changing anything about your account.
Arabic reads right to left
Arabic is not the same page with the words replaced. The whole interface flips: the reading direction, the alignment of text and numbers, the order of navigation, which side a panel opens from. This was built in from the first page rather than added later, because a right-to-left layout retrofitted onto a left-to-right one is always slightly wrong in ways that are hard to name and easy to feel.
The small language tag
Sometimes an article or a guide shows a short language code next to its date. It means what it says: the page you asked for exists, but not yet in the language of the address you used, so you are reading the English original.
We could have hidden this and served English silently. We do not, for two reasons. A reader deserves to know which language they are about to read before they start. And a search engine that is told an English text is French will rank it for people who cannot read it — which serves nobody, including us.
Numbers, dates and currencies
Dates, numbers and amounts are formatted for the language you are reading in, not for ours. The same balance is written differently in German and in Hindi, and both are correct.
If something reads badly
Translation is work that is never finished, and a machine-drafted sentence that is technically correct can still be the wrong sentence. If something reads awkwardly, or plainly wrong, tell us — say which language and which page. It is one of the easiest kinds of report to act on.