Languages

A site's languages are managed in the app under its Languages area. Adding a language makes the site available in it — the language gets its own URLs; removing one takes it down.

Two kinds of language

Every language beyond the site's primary one is either translated or hand-authored:

• Translated — the platform machine-translates the site into it on publish. This is the normal choice, and what the app adds. How many a site can have depends on its plan; the app shows the current limit.
• Hand-authored — you write the translations yourself, in a locale folder in the site's files. These are free and unlimited, and never machine-translated. Pages you haven't written fall back to the primary language.

The plan limit applies to translated languages only, so a site can carry a handful of translated languages alongside any number of hand-authored ones. A language can also be both: hand-author the pages that matter and let machine translation fill in the rest.

Hand-authored languages are managed with the CLI

Because their content lives in the project's files, hand-authored languages are added, removed, and switched to automatic translation with the CLI only:

acira language add de --no-translate   # add one you'll write yourself
acira language set de --translate      # hand it over to machine translation
acira language rm de                   # stop serving it

The app and the AI assistant show them — so you always see everything the site serves — but won't change them. Removing one from the app would delete translation work that only exists in your files, and neither surface can write those files. They manage automatically translated languages instead.

Adding and removing languages

Pick the languages a site should be published in. When you add a translated one, the site's content is translated into it on the next publish and served on locale-prefixed URLs so it's independently indexable. Removing a language removes those pages.

The site's language list is the single source of truth for what it serves. A locale folder in the project overrides the translation of a language the site already has — it can't add one, and a folder for a language the site doesn't have is rejected at publish. So enable the language first, then write its files.

How translation works

The mechanics — automatic translation, manual overrides, glossary terms, right-to-left handling, and translated database content — are covered under Internationalization. This page is just the control for turning languages on and off; the capability page explains what happens when you do.

SEO benefit

Because each language is a real, server-rendered set of pages on its own URLs, adding languages expands a site's search footprint — every language is separately discoverable. Content inside a single-page app area is the exception, since it renders in the browser.