A Ukrainian-language edition, on purpose

Localization is usually a checkbox: ship the framework, wire a few strings, call it international. This wasn't that. The Invisible Infrastructure series, the field data at The Legibility Gap, the Wartime Edition of the sorting-machine essay, all of it measures Ukraine's recovery from the inside. Writing carefully about a place and then making that writing unreadable to the people who live there is its own small failure of legibility. There is already a private trip log on the site (the one whose blue-and-gold flag theme got a make it MORE Ukrainian note from the person actually living there). The public research deserved the same intention. That is the whole motivation: the work points at Ukraine, so the site should be able to speak Ukrainian back.

It is a full subtree, not a page. Under the hood it is a set of URL-prefix i18n primitives: canonical English at /path, Ukrainian at /ua/path, paired with hreflang so search engines treat them as twins. On top of that sit the real surfaces:

• A translated landing at /ua, and locale-aware chrome everywhere: the nav, the footer, and an EN | UA language switcher that swaps any page for its twin.
• Two fully interactive research instruments rebuilt in Ukrainian, The Legibility Gap and the Wartime Edition, live widgets and all, with every number still computed from the language-neutral dataset so the figures can never drift from the English original.
• Curated essay companions: The Sorting Machine, The New Sorting Hat, Stance Design, and What the State Keeps.
• Two index hubs, /ua/research and /ua/blog, so the whole thing is browsable rather than a drawer of loose URLs.
• A bilingual blog pipeline: additive Ukrainian columns, a translator agent, and an admin editor, so any post here can carry a Ukrainian twin without forking the English one.

The load-bearing decision is that nothing here is on-the-fly machine output. Every Ukrainian page is a curated artifact. The interactive instruments are translated string by string, with the data left untouched. The long essays become faithful companions: a forty-thousand-word piece does not need a forty-thousand-word translation to be legible to a Ukrainian reader, it needs an honest condensation that keeps every sourced figure and then links back to the full English interactive. Where a translation exists, you get it; where one doesn't yet, you get the English original with a small chip that tells you so before you click. The reader is always told the truth about what they are about to read.

A few decisions were made on purpose, and a couple of them cut against the textbook:

• The locale code is ua, the country code, not the uk language code. The standards-correct tag is uk; I chose the flag's country code for brand consistency, knowing it costs a little machine-readability. A deliberate trade, documented so it can be reverted.
• English stays byte-identical. The Ukrainian surfaces are separate, curated artifacts layered beside the English ones, never a fork of them. Adding the whole edition regressed the English site by zero bytes.
• The fonts can carry Cyrillic. The edition is built around the four typefaces that actually ship Cyrillic glyphs, so nothing renders as tofu.
• It is not the trip log. /ua is the public language edition; the private /ukraine trip log is a different surface with its own translator, deliberately kept separate.
• No em dashes, in either language, scanned in CI.

The point of building it this way is that the next translation is cheap. A new essay companion is a content file plus a thirty-line page on a shared shell. A new bilingual blog post is a few Ukrainian fields on the existing row. One registry of translated paths drives the sitemap, the hreflang tags, and the dead-link-safe link rewriting all at once, so breadth never gets ahead of correctness. The edition is deliberately unfinished: most essays still open in English, and that is fine, because the front doors and the chips make the half-built state honest. More companions and more translated posts will land on the same rails.

The loop at the top isn't a mockup. The site has a /cover/<slug> surface, a full-bleed cinematic title card for any post, and a small recorder (scripts/covers/record-covers.mjs) opens it in a headless browser, captures exactly one seamless animation loop at 1080p, and encodes a VP9 webm, an H.264 mp4, and a poster frame straight into /public/covers/. The homepage feed and this post's hero pick it up automatically. Same pipeline that films the Studio reels, pointed at a cover instead of a walkthrough.