Saily WR in five languages

Saily WR was born in French, but the sea has no language, and the crews who sail the Channel, the Atlantic or the Mediterranean come from everywhere. A tool to plan a passage should speak to the skipper in the language they think in, so that a route's limits and a forecast's caveats are understood at first reading, not guessed at.

Every page is now written in five languages, English, French, German, Spanish and Italian: the routing and boat pages, the routes' summaries and charts, the user guide, the page of each weather model and this blog. Each new language opens the app to its own sailors: German to the crews of the North Sea and the Baltic, Spanish to those of Spain's coasts, from Galicia to the Balearics, Italian to those of the Tyrrhenian and the Adriatic.

On every page, the language menu lists all five, each written in its own words, and opens the same page in the one you pick. Your browser remembers that choice, and a link a crewmate shares in another language then opens in yours. Until you choose, a browser that prefers another of the five is offered it in a discreet banner, written in that language.

Take a crew gathering in Palma for a week in the Balearics. The skipper, who reads English, sends round the page of the wind model the passage to Menorca rests on; the mate opens it in Spanish, the friend flying in from Genoa in Italian, each on the same page in their own words, and everyone aboard knows what the forecast can see and what it cannot.

The language changes the words, never the routes: the same models, the same depths and the same route in any of the five. Only a few of the engine's rare failure messages still come in English or French. The choice is kept in this browser, on this device, so make it once on each one you plan from; closing the banner keeps the page's language.