Legal notice & privacy

Our purpose: passing it on

Lingala Facile helps the Congolese diaspora, and anyone curious, learn Lingala: a talking dictionary, games, exercises, the Bible in four languages. The site is free and ad-free. By using it, you accept the terms described on this page: they come down to one idea, respect.

Access to the service

The site is open to everyone, day and night, with no account and nothing to install. You can also install it as an app and take it offline. We take great care of it, but a website is still a website: a technical interruption is always possible, with no promise of permanent availability.

The publisher

The site is published and run by Hans Mluanda, responsible for publication. A question, a remark, a right to exercise: write to [email protected] and a human will answer.

Hosting

The site lives on Oracle Cloud servers in Zurich, Switzerland, and is delivered and protected by Cloudflare, which shields it against attacks. Two recognised providers, and a site that sleeps in Switzerland.

What we don’t collect

No account, no cookie, no tracker, no profiling, no advertising. Even the visit counter on the home page is just an anonymous total: no IP address, no cookie, no log. You cannot lose what you do not hold.

What stays with you

Your settings (chosen language, your reading position in the Bible, game preferences) are stored in your browser’s local storage. They never leave your device and we have no access to them. To erase them, clear the site data in your browser.

If you write to us

Your address is used to reply to you, nothing else. No mailing list, no resale, no sharing. You can ask for our exchange to be deleted at any time.

Technical intermediaries

As with any website, requests pass through our two providers: Cloudflare (protection and delivery) and Oracle (servers). They process the technical data needed for transport, nothing more. No third-party advertising or analytics service is plugged in.

Your rights

The Swiss data protection act (FADP) applies, and the GDPR for visitors from the European Union: right of access, rectification and erasure. Since we keep almost nothing, the answer will often be “we have nothing on you”. That is the best possible answer. To exercise a right: [email protected].

Children first

The site is designed to be readable from age 9: no account, no public messaging, no purchases, no ads. Parents can let their children explore with peace of mind.

Security

Encrypted connection, strict content policy (your browser only runs code coming from the site), hardened headers, zero outside dependencies. The best attack surface is the one that doesn’t exist.

Found a flaw? Write to us, leaving a reasonable delay before any public disclosure:

[email protected]

What belongs to whom

The site’s texts, design, illustrations and code belong to their author (© Lingala Facile, Hans Mluanda). Sharing a link or quoting a passage with its source: always welcome. Reusing whole pages or datasets: ask first, we are happy to talk.

Borrowed content

Bible texts come from published editions, never reconstructed from memory: Louis Segond 1910, the World English Bible and the Lutherbibel 1912 (public domain), and for Lingala the Open Lingala Contemporary Bible by Biblica (Creative Commons BY-SA). The dictionary is built on published sources. The Andika typeface is published by SIL under the OFL licence. The music “AfricaDance” is a creation by Sebastiao Loopes, played with his agreement.

AI, in its right place

The audio pronunciations are a synthetic voice, generated offline from a voice released under Creative Commons: an honest approximation while we wait for real recordings, and the pages concerned say so. No Bible verse and no dictionary word is invented by a machine: everything comes from published editions and sources. The site itself is developed with the help of an AI, under human review and human decisions.

Our commitment, and its limits

The content is prepared with great care and a visible honesty rule: when a piece of data is uncertain (Kikongo, Tshiluba), the page says so. The site is nevertheless provided “as is”, with no guarantee of completeness or absence of errors: it helps you learn, it replaces neither a teacher nor professional advice. External sites we link to belong to their publishers.

Applicable law

These terms are governed by Swiss law; the venue is the publisher’s place of residence in Switzerland, subject to mandatory rules of your country of residence. If a clause were found invalid, the others would remain in force. This page evolves with the site: the date below is authoritative.