A few week past, there was a new version of WordPress, which broke the plugin I was using for localisation / translation. This was not really a surprise, as it had not been updated in ages, and its functioning was increasingly erratic. I searched for an alternative for some time, but they all seemed to be both complicated and paying, and while this blog definitively is multi-lingual, I don’t think it is in a way that justifies the expense and me fighting yet another complex plugin. These days my goal is more to run as close to stock WordPress as possible, to minimise maintenance and security risks.

The broader issue for me is that in 2023, with all the talk about diversity, most computing tools are mono-lingual. The thing is, 43% of the world population is at least bilingual. Even though the software community behaves as this was a minority case, it is not. What I really would like WordPress to have some basic multi-lingual support out of the box: this means adapting the chrome, an be able to tag content as being in a given language and explain what content is a translation of what other. I don’t need tools to do the actual translations (this can be a plugin), just my CMS to allow me to add enough meta-data to handle multi-lingual data.