4.2 – Missing translations

The normal case on a growing site: the page exists in English, the German one is still missing. What should the switcher say?

options:
  switcher:
    missing: home

missing	What happens	Price
home	The entry leads to that language’s start page	The click goes somewhere other than expected — the tooltip says so, but not everyone reads it
hide	The entry is absent	The switcher changes length from page to page, and nobody learns the language exists
disabled	The entry is there, greyed out, without a link	Honest, but a dead entry taking up room

The default is home — at least it leads to where the language begins.

What the switcher emits for it

A fallback entry gets a class of its own and a tooltip:

<a href="../fr/" class="fallback" hreflang="fr-FR" lang="fr-FR"
   data-lang="fr" title="Français (start page)">Français</a>

Through .multilanguage-switcher .fallback it can be set apart in the site’s CSS — italic, paler, with a mark after it. That takes the sting out of home without making the entry disappear.

The alternative: redirects

If home is too vague, you can instead make sure the address exists at all: fallbackPages: redirect creates a redirect page for every missing translation, leading to the version that does exist. The click then goes to de/coffee, lands on en/coffee, and the address works as a bookmark too. See 6.2 – Missing pages.

And the notice

The other way round: when a visitor lands on the English page although they speak German, and the German version exists — they should learn about it without searching the switcher. That is what the notices in chapter 7 are for.