quarantine 'em

Just as exciting as the translations, for me, are the translation notes https://docs.google.com/document/d/1x6_O71rZeehZC3arwTCBn2wAMNytS0MfIZgs6wBevGg/edit?usp=sharing …

(That's not the original Google document, it's a copy I made which isn't open up to the whole world for comments)

This is not the first work of mine to be translated. "...Responsibility" exists in Polish, French and Portuguese https://qntm.org/responsibility 

It's becoming a problem. Well, not so much a problem, but definitely a question

"How to present multiple translations of the same work" is not the same question as "How to present a web page in the correct language"

The second question is easy. Inspect the "Accept-Language" HTTP header, serve the page in the most preferred available language

But in this case, we would have a situation where, like, five out of the 655 pages on my site randomly appear in Hebrew, the rest in English

This would be very surprising behaviour, and not terribly helpful to someone expecting to read the whole story in a single language

Or even to someone expecting to browse the whole site in a single language

I know for a fact that it's not acceptable to, due to incomplete translation work, serve one web page in a mixture of languages

I'm cautiously of the opinion that the same applies to a whole site. Just translating e.g. the front page is unhelpful

We know that GeoCities-style "Under Construction" banners are bad; a translated front page with everything else in English is basically that

Anything which requires the user to muck about with their language settings just for you is also probably to be avoided

In French my site would be one or two points of light in an ocean of English or, arguably better, 404s

This is a much more highly-developed problem over at the SCP Foundation http://www.scp-wiki.net/ 

There is the English SCP wiki. And e.g. the Russian translations of the SCP wiki. But there are also original Russian SCP wiki entries

But that's a different problem, because the e.g. Korean SCP wiki is a separately maintained site which I can leave in its users' hands

And in fact maintenance/crosslinking of the English SCP wiki is also not really in my hands. I mainly just pootle around their IRC channel

So anyway, my problem is different from the other problems I've mentioned, and the solution is unfortunately WORK

I'm thinking probably a thin border at the top of the page where you can switch among multiple translations, if they exist

Let's see, reinstall Apache, MySQL and PHP or just edit production using WinSCP. Decisions, decisions

My first development job was PHP and MySQL so they will always hold a place in my heart, in an Iron Man shrapnel sort of way