Confusione Babelica – The Beauty of the Multilingual World

We now have five chess calendars, but I’ve started thinking about how to expand our product offerings. It became clear to me that creating versions in other languages would increase our ability to reach more people. If someone loves or plays chess but doesn’t speak English, they probably wouldn’t be interested in buying an English-language calendar.

So, the decision was made: translate the page descriptions and the calendar grid into multiple languages. Thankfully, using a print-on-demand provider makes life easier. The calendars are already available in 12 languages (e.g., German, French, Spanish, etc.), which means "translating" often just involves selecting the desired language from the available options.

However, since our beautiful world has far more than 12 languages, for some of them, the calendar grid had to be rebuilt from scratch. Only the descriptions needed manual translation. And even with today’s technology, that’s not as easy as it seems. Tools like Google Translate or ChatGPT can help, but they sometimes mistranslate key details. To ensure accuracy, I asked friends and friends-of-friends—native speakers of the specific languages—to do the translations.

Now, I’m proud to say that we can offer calendars in 18 different languages! Beyond the “obvious” global languages like English, Spanish, and French, we’ve added a mix of Western European languages (e.g., Danish, Swedish, Dutch, Norwegian Bokmål), Central European ones (e.g., Hungarian, Croatian), and some commonly spoken in Asia (e.g., Chinese, Tamil, Kannada, Sinhala, and Malay).

A funny story: just a day after the Simplified Chinese version became available, I received an order for it—from Norway! It’s a small world, isn’t it?