Smart Soccer Stats Is Now in German — and the Translation Is Machine-Made

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Most football fans don't search in English. A supporter of 1. FC Köln looks for Serien, direkter Vergleich and Tabelle, not "streaks", "head to head" and "standings" — and until this week, this site had nothing to offer them in their own language.

That changes today. Every page now exists in German as well. The address is the English one with /de on the end:

The flag in the top-right corner of every page switches language and keeps you on the page you were on — including any search you had built in one of the tools.

What is translated, and what isn't

Everything the site says is translated: menus, filter labels, table headers, the explanations under each tool, and the generated text on the team, league, rivalry and streak pages. Dates and numbers follow German conventions too — a score reads 2:1, a percentage 35,3 %.

What the site shows stays exactly as the data delivers it. Team names, league names, venues and competitions are not translated, so Bayern München is Bayern München in both languages and the Premier League stays the Premier League. Translating names is how a stats site ends up with a club nobody can find.

The translation is machine-made

I want to be upfront about this: the German text is generated automatically, not written by a native speaker. I've read through it and it reads well to me, but football vocabulary is regional and full of habits, and a machine gets some of them wrong. Somewhere on the site there is a phrase no German fan would ever use.

The same will go for the languages that come next — Italian, Spanish, French and Dutch are on the list, in roughly that order.

Tell me what's wrong

If you read the German pages and something sounds off — a clumsy sentence, the wrong word for a stat, a label that means something else in a German stadium — please write to me. A single line with the page and the phrase is enough, and corrections go straight into the site.

Every fix makes the next language better too, because the same lessons apply. Vielen Dank!

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