Multilingual Website: Why Translation Alone Isn't Enough

A multilingual website is one that presents the same content to visitors in different languages, completely and in a way that fits their own habits. While reviewing the English version of a website as an intern at Diyojen, I learned this: translating the text is only half the job. The real work starts in the corners nobody looks at after the translation is done.

I'm Evrim, an intern at Diyojen. In this post, starting from a small error I spotted on my phone screen one Thursday afternoon, I'll share five lessons I learned while preparing a multilingual website.

That error message left in Turkish on my phone

The most common problem on multilingual websites is that the main text gets translated while the small system messages are forgotten. The moment I noticed this was very clear: it was 4:10 p.m., and I was filling in the English column of the pre-launch checklist. I deliberately typed an incomplete phone number into the contact form on the English version of the site and hit submit. In red letters, the screen showed: "Lütfen geçerli bir telefon numarası girin." (Please enter a valid phone number.)

The rest of the page was flawless English. Headings, paragraphs, the menu, everything was in place. But the form's error message had stayed in Turkish. A visitor who doesn't speak Turkish wouldn't know what to do at this point and would most likely close the page. When I sent a screenshot to our design team, the reply I got shaped my next few weeks: "Now go through the whole site again with the same eye."

The text most often forgotten in translation

• Form error and confirmation messages
• Button labels ("Submit", "Read more", "Book now")
• Automatic emails sent after a form is submitted
• Image alt text, the short descriptions that describe an image and don't appear on screen
• Page titles shown in the browser tab and the short descriptions that appear on Google
• The 404 page, the warning screen that appears when the requested page can't be found

Lessons 1 and 2: Words aren't the same length, and meanings aren't the same either

The same sentence is written at different lengths in different languages, and that difference directly affects the design. A button label that looks short in Turkish can spill onto two lines in another language. That's why at Diyojen we don't check a multilingual page in just one language; we check it on screen in each language separately. For a while, I opened every page one by one, for every language, on both a computer and a phone.

The second lesson was the difference between translation and localization. Localization means not just carrying content over into another language, but adapting it to the habits of the people who speak that language. Date formats, currency, the country code at the start of a phone number, and even the examples used to describe a service are all part of it.

Lesson 3: You need to tell Google which page is in which language

A search engine can't always figure out on its own that the different language versions of a site are counterparts of each other. Hreflang is a small piece of code that tells Google what language a page is in and which page is its equivalent in other languages. When it's set up correctly, someone searching in English reaches the English page, and someone searching in Turkish reaches the Turkish page.

I didn't write this code; our development team did. My job was to list whether every page actually had a counterpart. Once I made the list, I saw that one page had never been prepared in English, and the language switcher was sending visitors straight to the homepage. It seems like a small thing, but for the visitor it means being pulled away from what they were reading.

Lessons 4 and 5: The language switcher and the habit of updating

A language switcher should let visitors change the language while staying on the page they're on. I learned that our team prefers to write the name of the language itself instead of using flags, because a language is spoken in more than one country and a flag doesn't always send the right signal. Forcibly redirecting visitors to another language based on their browser language can also be confusing; the choice should stay with the visitor.

The last lesson is about life after launch: the biggest risk for a multilingual website is that when content is updated in one language, the other language gets forgotten. A campaign changes on the Turkish page and stays in its old form on the English page for months. That's why we talk about the importance of seeing every language side by side in the admin panels Diyojen develops. Among Diyojen's works, a multilingual website was developed for HosDent and a bilingual website for Mehmet Turgut; looking through these projects helped me better understand that every language needs to be handled with the same care.

That Thursday, a single error message left in Turkish earned me a checklist. Now when I look at a website, I check the language switcher first, then the form's error message. If you're curious how we build websites for brands that want to reach international visitors, take a look at our web design page.

In short

• A multilingual website is more than translating text; form messages, buttons and automatic emails also need to be translated.
• Localization means adapting content to the target visitor's date, currency and contact conventions.
• Each language version should be checked separately on both a computer and a phone, because text lengths change.
• Hreflang tells Google which pages are language equivalents and helps the right visitor reach the right language.
• After launch, reflecting an update in one language across all the other languages should become a habit.