Twelve languages, one page each

ipe.rest speaks twelve languages, and every one of them is a real page of its own. Here is how that works, and why we label the translations that a machine made.

ipe() is a small studio in Seoul, and the people it makes music for are developers and focus-seekers all over the world. A tired mind at the end of a long day should not have to translate anything. So the site is available in English, Korean, Japanese, Chinese, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Russian, Arabic, Hindi and Indonesian.

One page per language

Each language is its own plain, static page at its own address. There is no script that swaps the words after the page loads, and no hidden setting that changes what a link shows. If you share the Japanese page of a journal entry, the person who opens it sees Japanese. If a search engine reads it, it reads Japanese. The root address, ipe.rest, is only a language chooser, and the home page, the journal and every entry exist separately in all twelve languages.

Arabic is written from right to left, so its pages are laid out right to left, instead of forcing a left-to-right page onto a language that does not read that way.

Two languages by hand, ten by machine

We write the journal in English and Korean. Those are the originals, and they are the only ones a person wrote. The other ten languages are AI translations of them. We think it would be wrong to let those pages pass as something they are not, so each one carries a short note: this page was machine translated from the original, it may contain mistakes, and the original is the authoritative text. A link in the note takes you straight to it.

The English and Korean pages carry no such note, because they need none. It is the same habit as everywhere else in the studio. The music is made with AI (Suno) and we say so openly, and the translations are made with AI and we say so just as openly. We would rather be plain about the tools than pretend otherwise.

What the site remembers

When you pick a language, the site saves that choice in your own browser, in local storage under the name ipe_lang. It stays on your device and is never sent to us. That is how a later visit can open in the language you chose. The site also keeps a cache of its own files, so that it opens quickly and can work offline. You can clear both in your browser settings, and nothing else about you is kept for the sake of a language.

What does not translate

A few things stay as they are in every language. The closing line of each track, “ipe. be still,” is always in English, as a quiet signature. The name ipe() stays ipe(). And the contact page lists English and Korean, because one person reads every message, so write to us in either one. We reply within ten days.

ipe(); // say it in your own language

If you find a translated page that reads strangely, that is the machine, not you. Open the original through the link in the note, and tell us what looked wrong. Corrections are one of the things the contact page is for.