It is time to say farewell to my German pages. Last year I installed Polylang, a WordPress plugin that allows multiple languages on a site. The software is easy to use and works seamlessly. It allows me to easily add German translation pages to the website.

All told, I translated and added around 200 German-language pages and also created the headers and footers and menu items to allow navigation in German.

But recently I did a bit of checking on my website statistics and see that most visits to the German-languages pages came from bots and other automated scans rather than actual visitors. This was rather disheartening considering the amount of effort I put into created them.

Manually translating my original English into German is a time-consuming task, as references and humorous wordplays don’t translate easily. I also used the best free translator I could find, Deepl, but much of those translations are obviously machine-made and don’t make for good reading. I accepted this low quality for most of the pages, and the results weren’t great.

Since the automated translation software available in the web for browsers has become so good, I’ve decided to remove all references to the old German pages on the website, but keep the old pages online anyway, even if they do become rather stale over time.