More than running text through a translator
Machine translation can garble tone, miss idioms, and embarrass you in front of the exact customers you are courting. A proper multilingual site uses human or human-reviewed translation for anything customer-facing, and localizes more than words — dates, currency, phone formats, and images that fit each audience.
It also has to be built so each language has its own real, indexable pages, not a translate button that swaps text on the fly and leaves search engines seeing only one language.
- Human or human-reviewed translation for customer-facing content
- Localization of dates, currency, units, and phone formats
- Separate, indexable URLs for each language
- A clear language switcher that remembers the choice
- Right-to-left (RTL) layout support for languages like Arabic and Hebrew
- Culturally appropriate imagery and examples, not just swapped text
hreflang and the SEO side of going multilingual
The technical heart of a multilingual site is hreflang — tags that tell Google which language and region each page is for, so the right version shows up in the right country's results. Get it wrong and search engines may show the wrong language or treat your translations as duplicate content.
We set up a clean URL structure for each language and the hreflang relationships between them, then submit the versions so search engines index them correctly.
- hreflang tags mapping each page to its language and region
- A consistent structure (subdirectory, subdomain, or ccTLD) chosen for your goals
- Avoiding duplicate-content issues across languages
- Language-specific sitemaps submitted to search engines
- A default/fallback language for unmatched visitors
- A build that makes adding a new language later straightforward
More on web design & development
Frequently asked questions
Can't I just use Google Translate on my site?
For casual reading, maybe — but auto-translate widgets produce content search engines don't index per language, and the quality can hurt your brand. For anything customer-facing, real translated pages with proper hreflang perform far better.
What is hreflang and why does it matter?
It's a tag that tells search engines which language and region a page targets, so a Spanish speaker sees the Spanish page and an English speaker the English one. Without it, engines may serve the wrong version or flag your translations as duplicates.
Do I need to translate the whole site at once?
No. Many businesses start with their most important pages in a second language and expand over time. We build the structure so adding languages or pages later is clean rather than a rebuild.