The bench learns four languages

Le Banc launched in French, and French only. That was deliberately narrow. The trouble with a narrow launch in a proximity app is that proximity doesn't respect language borders.

The app now speaks French, English, Dutch, German and Spanish. It takes the phone's language, and you can change it in the settings.

Translating a tone

The difficulty wasn't technical. It was the tone: dry, direct, second person, never corporate. "The bench didn't like that" translated literally means nothing; you have to find the equivalent dryness in each language.

One technical detail all the same. The server no longer sends sentences, it sends facts: "this person sat down", with the name and its gender. The app builds the sentence. French is the only one of the five that has to agree — "Josiane s'est assise", "Firmin s'est assis" — and it would have been absurd to make the server carry that.

The names themselves stay the same in every language. A German called Ghislaine for the evening is exactly right.