Announcement
Why every screen is in Kyrgyz
Three out of four schoolchildren in Kyrgyzstan study in Kyrgyz, yet none of the open courses we surveyed has a Kyrgyz version. Arena ships Kyrgyz on every screen from day one.
Arena launches in three languages at once: Kyrgyz, Russian and English. That is a rule, not a setting. No screen, lesson or challenge ships in one language and waits for the others, and nothing falls back to English when a translation is missing.
The numbers behind the rule
Kyrgyzstan is bilingual in a way that is easy to misread. About 80% of the population speaks Russian, and 70–80% of university programmes are taught in Russian. Yet 75% of schoolchildren attend Kyrgyz-medium schools, and in many rural communities Kyrgyz is the only language spoken.
An open-age league that starts in Kyrgyzstan has to reach the 15-year-old in a Kyrgyz-medium school in Osh as easily as the developer in Bishkek who works in Russian. If the first screen she sees is in a language she reads slowly, she leaves, and the ranking loses exactly the talent it was built to find.
A gap nobody has filled
While researching the free content Arena can legally use, we surveyed the major open courses on AI, automation and programming, from MIT to Hugging Face. Many exist in Russian. Not one has a Kyrgyz version.
That makes Kyrgyz a first-mover asset. Translating permissively licensed courses from their Russian versions is legal for a commercial platform, and nobody else holds the result. Our pipeline runs from the Russian source to a machine draft, then a human Kyrgyz editor, a shared glossary, and attribution kept as each licence requires. The plan is to publish the Kyrgyz AI curriculum as an open asset in Season 1.
Until a long course is translated, it enters the catalogue in Russian under a Russian label. We will never show untranslated Russian under a Kyrgyz label.
Fair in every language
Language also shapes how skills are measured. Kyrgyz words are longer on average than English or Russian ones, so a reading test that counts words would mark Kyrgyz readers down. Arena's reading test normalises speed by characters per word for each language (5.9 for Kyrgyz, 5.4 for Russian, 5.5 for English) and multiplies it by comprehension. A Kyrgyz reader and an English reader face the same bar.
The app's automated tests render screens in all three languages, so a missing Kyrgyz string fails the build before any player sees it.