A language switcher is the easy fifth of a multilingual site. The rest is routing, canonical rules, hreflang clusters, a translation workflow that does not depend on one person's inbox, layouts that survive German compound nouns and Arabic reading right to left, and a policy for what happens to a page whose translation has not arrived. Sites that skip this ship duplicates under a dozen prefixes and suppress their own rankings.
What the work involves
- Locale routing and URL structure decided deliberately, including what the root serves
- hreflang clusters and self-referential canonicals across every language
- A translation pipeline with a real review step, not a plugin calling an API on page load
- Layouts tested against long languages and right-to-left scripts
- Locale-correct formatting of dates, numbers and currency
- A stated policy for untranslated pages, implemented rather than hoped for
Why we are credible at this
This site runs in twenty-two languages. A page counts as translated into a language only when that language carries at least ninety per cent of its strings and fewer than thirty per cent are identical to the English — a test that exists because a translation provider echoing the source back produces a bundle that looks complete and is not.
What moves the price
We quote after discovery and the number is fixed before anything starts. These are the things that move it, so you can see roughly where your project sits before you talk to us.
- Number of languages, and whether any are right-to-left
- Whether translation is machine-assisted, human reviewed, or fully professional
- Whether content differs by market or is the same text translated
- Whether existing content must be retrofitted into a localised structure
Proof we have done this
Questions we get asked
Other Web Design work
Tell us what you are trying to do
A short conversation is usually enough to tell whether we are the right people. If we are not, we will say so and point you somewhere better.