Field Notes #3: We Deleted 16 Languages. The Traffic Barely Noticed.

In the third installment of their 'Field Notes' series, the author details the decision to reduce their site's multilingual support from 21 languages down to six. The move was driven by quality control concerns, as the automated pipeline struggled to maintain native-level accuracy across such a broad range of locales. Despite the reduction, the author observed that the site's search traffic remained largely unaffected, with some deleted languages even outperforming the retained ones in terms of clicks. The author emphasizes that a translation is a promise to the reader and that maintaining high standards is more important than sheer volume. Moving forward, the site will continue to enforce strict quality checks for its remaining six languages, ensuring that every piece of content meets specific linguistic and technical criteria before publication, while the author continues to experiment with automated site management.