Today I have spent a couple of hours adding multilingual support to my website, meaning that I now can have both English and Danish content at the same time. To achieve this I’m using a plugin from Polylang which allows me to write everything in both languages easily ish, more on how it works later.
Although Danish is my primary language, depending on what I write, I often find it easier to express myself in English. Why this is, I am not sure, but the fact that most of the media I consume on a daily basis is in English might be a big factor.
This aside, the main reason I am making this switch is because I have a plan of transitioning to writing more about projects than travelling (because I cannot really afford to travel that much…), and given that most of the resources I will be using for these projects probably will be in English as well, it just makes the most sense for me to write in that language as well. Most of what I am going to write, I will probably translate to Danish at some point, but because the service I am using is free, there is no automatic translation involved – I have to translate everything myself.
How does it work?
First and foremost, the plugin adds a button to change between languages, for now it can be found at the top of every page, but this might change at a later point in time.
This is mostly all for the part of user experience. On the Danish version of the site all English content will hidden and vice versa for the English version. On my end, everything is really simple as well; whenever I write a new post, page or whatever, I just have to choose the language I am writing and then when I am done writing in that language I can create a translation which just makes a “linked” blank page where I can then translate the content I have just written into. It is a bit of double work, but that is just what translation is…
When can I read everything in English?
Right now there is no posts other than this one translated into English but this will soon change as I am planning to translate at least one post or page for the rest of July. If I am not finished by then, I will decide what to do at that point ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Will you add more languages?
Hmm… That is a really good question , answer is, I am not sure. Currently I can only write comfortably in English and Danish, so for now that is all it is going to be. But as I have a dream of learning more languages (probably Spanish or French), I might try to translate some of my posts as a challenge for myself.