I am doing a pretty small website with about 6 to 8 webpages (and maybe a blog in the future) in German. I will also translate these pages into 6 to 8 ENGLISH version pages. Is it possible to create a subdirectory /en and /de after the domain name without enduring the hassle to configure WP into a multisite host?
you can install WordPress in a subfolder, but to all intents and purposes that will be a separate site.
if the sole purpose of this is for translation, then you may want to use a Translation plugin to manage that for you instead of running multiple WP installs