Multilingual websites are hard

Have you ever had to manage a website in many languages and asked yourself - is this worth it?

This post makes absolutely no attempt to give any answers or deliver any hope.

Language linguine

As a web content manager, there are approximately 5,052 different things to think about, especially around UX, such as

• how do I keep all content consistently updated?
• do I need to?
• how do I flag in-progress translations?
• how do I tame simple English menu items in giant Hungarian or German?
• what do I do with mixed language pages?
• what if I can't translate every page - how do I signal internal links?
• do I use a proxy translation service, human translation, or something else?
• how much will this all mess up my urls?

And also while we're at it, the sinking feeling of

won't everyone just use something else, like Deepl, or Google, or even - I dare to say it - Bing?

It's still worth it

Apart from the obvious SEO benefits, I suppose one way of deciding is about satisfaction.

• how quickly will your visitors disappear if they have to struggle?
• how much more successful will your organisation be with no language barrier to getting your message across?
• do you want to declare that your organisation isn't worth the time spent to create localised content?

Content management systems are always improving how site managers can pull in multilingual content. And - sadly for businesses that serve human translations - everyone knows that machine translations are getting better.

Have a real person do it

Obviously I'll be advocating for human translation as long as I (humanly) can. The fact of the matter is that a professional translator understands context, cultural references, nuance, and idioms, and machines do not. For now.