Piotr, one of our collaborators, being a Polish immigrant in Germany had a good laugh when he discovered that in Germany they say Zwei Fliegen mit einer Klappe schlagen
A saying that in English he knew as quite boring To kill two birds with one stone and in Polish is actually too quite funny Upiec dwie pieczenie na jednym ogniu
So we started wondering, what are the variants of this in other languages.
It is not an easy thing to google or automatically translate, as automatic translators just tend to return a local version of the saying and not a literal translation. Luckily Aachen is a pretty international city so we were able to quickly collect examples in many languages from native speakers.
We thought it might be a funny way to explore the world and thus the project was born.
As most of us are quite visual people these days we thought it will be fun to add some nice images to every saying. We looked for Public Domain images at least loosely connected with the saying in a particular language and when possible from general area where the language is used.
Of course the success rate in this kind of search varies, but we will be very happy to get suggestions for better (public domain) works to illustrate the sayings (use the contact form)
As this is a “side fun project” we could take time to make it right.
The site uses fantastic Astro with hybrid server side rendering, which means that sites that remain static (like pages for particular languages) are generated as static html and just served as such from a CDN (Content Delivery Network). While sites that require some interactivity (like the main page where you can see a random language every time) are server generated using very handy and fast Cloudflare pages.
We took to heart also a proper progressive enhancment - site is functional and allows browsing through the languages without javascript enabled. A little bit of javascript sprinkled here and there using a standard Web Components is used to things a bit more fun.
Design-wise site uses fantastic Forest and Cmyk themes from daisy ui
Thank you for visiting our site, hope you had some fun