Ithildin.ch now ships in French and Italian.
Ithildin.ch's existing English/German site now speaks all four of Switzerland's
working languages. The EN·DE·FR·IT switcher runs on every page, hreflang alternates
(including x-default) point search engines at the right locale, and the
page's <html lang> attribute switches with it.
The French and Italian dictionaries use the Swiss statutory abbreviations a reader
here expects rather than generic legal translations: LPD /
nLPD for data protection, and the information-security act as
LSI in French and LSIn in Italian. You can check
that against the shipped strings yourself — they are in
/assets/site.js, in plain text. Product names (Vanguard, Core, Enigma,
Argent, and the rest) are left untouched in every language, since they are proper
nouns, not descriptions.
The language you land on is saved for your next visit; a ?lang=de,
?lang=fr or ?lang=it link — the kind an ad, a share, or a
procurement email might carry — overrides it for that visit and becomes the new
preference. That preference is checked against a fixed list of supported languages
before it is ever applied, so a stray or malformed value (including attempts to smuggle
in a JavaScript prototype-chain key) safely falls back to English instead of being
rendered as-is.
Switzerland runs on four national languages. Software built for Swiss federal, cantonal and critical-infrastructure buyers should read naturally in whichever of them the person evaluating it actually uses — see Sectors for who that is, or Company for who built it.
Correction, 4 September 2026. An earlier version of this post said that French and Italian “were not machine-translated and dropped in” and that every FR/IT string “went through native-register review — Suisse romande phrasing for French, Ticino phrasing for Italian”. That was a claim about how the translation work was produced, carried over from a commit message, and we hold no record that evidences it. It has been removed rather than defended. What replaces it is the part anyone can verify from the shipped file: which statutory abbreviations the FR and IT dictionaries actually use.
Correction, 3 September 2026. An earlier version of this post said the French and Italian strings use the official “LPD / nLPD / IVA” terms. IVA — the Italian abbreviation for VAT — appears nowhere on this site; what the dictionaries actually ship is LPD/nLPD together with the information-security act as LSI in French and LSIn in Italian. The abbreviations paragraph was corrected that day.