Gaia Text website now also in Russian, Japanese… and Swiss German!

Our Swiss branch, established on 1 October 2008, is seeing magnificent growth!

In response, we’ve attempted something that no one else has ever tried: we’ve made the text on our website available in Swiss German (Schwiizertüütsch, Schwyzerdüütsch).

It wasn’t easy, due firstly to the fact that the dialects of each canton are so varied from one another that an expression chosen in one dialect may seem misleading or even wrong in another. Secondly, there is no consensus on what constitutes standard written Swiss German.

We did, however, manage to find someone in Switzerland who was up to the task of compiling a kind of “national language” from the various dialects (at least for the text on our website).

After having migrated our CMS to a new version to accommodate Swiss German, we are proud to have succeeded. We hope our Swiss visitors will get a laugh out of what they find rather than getting irritated, and that they will view this as an effective advertising measure J.

You can read more about Swiss German in the very informative Wikipedia article.