hangmango launched in English. It now has seven language versions — Spanish, French, Brazilian Portuguese, German, Welsh, Turkish, and English — all added in about two days.
- Each language is its own subdirectory (/es/, /fr/, /pt/, /de/, /cy/, /tr/) with its own word bank and game logic file. The structure is deliberate — completely separate pages rather than one page trying to handle everything, which keeps it simple and gives each version its own SEO footprint.
- Every language needs accent normalisation so players don't have to type accented characters. Pressing E should match é, è, ê. Pressing N should match ñ. This is handled differently per language — French has different accents to Spanish, Portuguese has tildes, German has ß which normalises to ss. Each one needs a bit of thought.
- Welsh had a specific problem that none of the others did: compound words with hyphens, like BARA-BRITH or TYLWYTH-TEG. Asking players to guess a hyphen is pointless, so hyphens now auto-reveal at the start of the game. Small thing but it would have been broken without it.
- Turkish was the most involved. The Turkish alphabet has two versions of the letter I — one with a dot (İ) and one without (I) — and they're different letters. The standard JavaScript `.toUpperCase()` doesn't handle this correctly, so a custom function was needed to get it right before any other processing happens.
- The English word bank was expanded at the same time — up from 6 categories to 14, adding Music, Mythology, Nature, Art, Literature, Cities, Technology, and History.
- Adding Turkish also prompted adding Yandex Search Console verification. Yandex accounts for around 53% of search volume in Turkey, so ignoring it while targeting Turkish speakers would be leaving a lot of potential traffic on the table.
- The language switcher needed a couple of rounds of layout fixes — first for the positioning on the page, then for mobile where seven buttons were overflowing on narrow screens.