Every page here is written twice, never translated

German URLs, German sentences, and the map that keeps your place.

This is NRW. I teach media founders here and most of that happens in German. A machine-translated site would have told them exactly what I think of them.

So every page exists twice, written separately. Not the same sentences pushed through a translator, but the same meaning said the way each language says it. The German events page is not the English one with different words on top.

It doubles the writing. Every page, every article, every filter label. There is no shortcut here and I stopped looking for one.

What I underestimated was the URLs. German pages need German URLs, /veranstaltungen and not /events, which meant building a real map between both sides so the language switch keeps your place instead of dropping you back on the homepage. Small detail, and it took longer than the translation.

The reason this got done in week one rather than later is the plan behind it. Düsseldorf first, then NRW, then wider. A project that starts in this region and reads like an import from somewhere else has already lost the room.