As things stand, I have redesigned everything related to the blog, the template, and the plugins to enable multilingualism. The switch is currently located (in a less than ideal design) in the main menu under the header so that it also works well on mobile devices.
The language can now be switched seamlessly anytime, anywhere. One drawback is that units and date formats are not adjusted accordingly, but I may change that in the future. However, this should not interfere with understanding the content.
Over the last few days, I’ve been busy translating all previous posts (over 130!) into English, along with everything that goes with it (e.g., the legal pages and categories, also over 200). I made the decision to post everything past and future bilingually because I myself search for and read almost everything in English, and I’m sure many others do the same. This also makes the content more international and reaches more people.
Simply put, many more people speak English than German, at least as a second language. Since English is the basis for everything in computer science anyway, the decision was easy. If I were fluent in the language, Mandarin would also be an option, as it is the world’s number one language – now and even more so in the future.
Technical changes
I use CSS extensively to make directly programmed functions context-dependent.
However, the basis for this is provided by the free version of Polylang. Without such a really good plugin, the effort involved would have been considerably greater. I think without it, I would have stuck with German. The management is really well done—not perfect, but very good for a free solution.
To establish a more pleasant workflow, I also work with the “Polylang Duplicate Content Addon” plugin, which duplicates content very conveniently.
From now on, I will try to publish everything I write directly in both languages.