Which languages can I read a country portal in, and what stays untranslated?
Seventeen, from the globe menu in the header, on every portal. What a translation does not touch is the wording of a listing.
The globe menu in the header switches the portal between seventeen languages: English, Spanish, Arabic, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, German, French, Brazilian Portuguese, Thai, Vietnamese, Japanese, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Khmer, Turkish and Greek.
The same seventeen are offered on every country portal — the list does not vary by market. Choosing one puts a short code in the address, so the page you are reading has its own shareable address in that language and a search engine can find it there.
What switching language does not change
- The words in a listing. A property title and description are written by whoever advertised it, in whatever language they wrote them, and they are shown as written.
- Place names, which stay in their local form.
- The currency a price is shown in, which follows the country the portal covers rather than the language you are reading.
The emails we send you
Emails from the portal are in English unless you have chosen a language yourself. The choice is one setting on My Profile — “Language for your dashboard, emails and invoices” — and it offers the same seventeen. Until you set it, it reads “Not chosen — English”, and English is what arrives.
That setting is the only thing that decides it. None of the following changes the language an email comes in:
- The language you were reading the portal in when the email was sent.
- The country the portal covers. A Thai portal does not send Thai to someone who never asked for it.
- The languages your browser asks for.
- Languages you speak on your profile, which records what you speak rather than what you want to be written to in.
The one rule covers every email the portal sends, the ones about vacation rental requests included. Where we are writing to an address with no portal account behind it — the confirmation an enquirer gets, for example — the email is in English, because there is no profile for a choice to live on.
So a German-language page on a Cyprus portal shows German navigation, German labels and German search controls around a description its advertiser wrote in English. That is deliberate: a machine-translated property description is a description nobody has checked, and a mistranslated one is worse than an English one.