Five languages and search-friendly pages

The work: 2 October 2026 · Written 1 November 2026 · Entry 10 of 17

On 2 October 2026 the project added multi-language support for search optimisation. English stays at the plain address, and other languages live under a prefix such as /es/ or /ja/. The first languages were English, Spanish and Arabic; the list was later reworked into English, Spanish, Japanese, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

One address per language

Each language version of a page has its own address. This lets a search engine list the right version for the right reader. The pages tell search engines about each other with hreflang links, and the sitemap lists every version, so that no language is left out.

Why Arabic was removed

Arabic was in the first list, but a typing game that practises the Latin alphabet gains little from a right-to-left interface, and keeping a language that nobody could test well was worse than not having it. Japanese and the two forms of Chinese took its place.

Translations are separate texts

Traditional and Simplified Chinese are not one text in two scripts: many everyday words differ between Taiwan and mainland China. The texts of each language are kept in their own files, and a glossary lists the word each language uses for each game term, with the place where it was checked.

Deploying

On the same day, a Cloudflare configuration file was added, so that the Astro build could be deployed to Cloudflare.

A language switcher that works without scripts

The language switcher is a list of real links, so it works even when JavaScript is off, and every language version can be reached from every page. A visitor is only offered a suggestion to switch; the site never redirects anybody away from the address they asked for.