Piotr, one of our collaborators, being a Polish immigrant in Germany had a good laugh when he discovered that in Germany they say Zwei Fliegen mit einer Klappe schlagen
A saying that in English he knew as quite boring To kill two birds with one stone and in Polish is actually too quite funny Upiec dwie pieczenie na jednym ogniu
So we started wondering, what are the variants of this in other languages.
It is not an easy thing to google or automatically translate, as automatic translators just tend to return a local version of the saying and not a literal translation. Luckily Aachen is a pretty international city so we were able to quickly collect examples in many languages from native speakers.
We thought it might be a funny way to explore the world and thus the project was born.
The site uses fantastic Astro with hybrid server side rendering, which means that sites that remain static (like pages for particular languages) are generated as static html and just served as such from a CDN (Content Delivery Network). While sites that require some interactivity (like the main page where you can see a random language every time) are server generated using very handy and fast Cloudflare pages.
We took to heart also a proper progressive enhancment - site is functional and allows browsing through the languages without javascript enabled. A little bit of javascript sprinkled here and there using a standard Web Components is used to things a bit more fun.
Design-wise site uses fantastic Forest and Cmyk themes from daisy ui
Unless we get a really good written source, we try to verify all sayings with native speakers.
If you notice an error or would like to add your own language, make a PR or use the contact form
All used images are works of art available in public domain. When possible we try to find and art work that is connected with the saying and geographically close to the area where the given language is spoken.
Trick used for a low tech and no cost form accepting solution is to use a val.town service. It is something like a zapier but with code - you can expose to internet simple functions that can, for example, accept form data and send emails.
The simple val we use:
<import { email } from "https://esm.town/v/std/email?v=9";
export async function handle(req: Request) {
(async () => {
const body = await req.formData();
const text = `
Message from Two With One form:
name: ${body.get("name")},
email: ${body.get("email")},
message: ${body.get("message")}`;
await email({ text });
})();
return Response.json({ ok: true });
}
which accepts form data and sends it as an email to us.
No database, no costs and no publicly eposed email addresses :)
Made with love in Aachen by:
Webdesign aus Aachen
