Multilingual platforms

We build multilingual public-facing platforms for governments, regulators and healthcare bodies — sites that have to work in 10, 30 or 60+ languages while still being editable by a small content team. The hard part isn't translation. It's the workflow, the accessibility, and search.

Why multilingual is harder than translation

Most CMS platforms can store language variants of a page. Few handle the things that follow: which language do you serve when a Welsh speaker lands on a Latvian page, and what's the right fallback chain? How does an editor know which translation is stale? How does search find a document in three languages without the user having to know which one is canonical? How do you make hreflang correct enough that Google doesn't pick a random variant?

Then there's accessibility. WCAG 2.1 has language-specific requirements (lang attribute, language change markup, direction support for RTL scripts). Get them wrong and screen readers pronounce Arabic in English phonetics. Most multilingual builds we audit miss at least one.

What we ship

  • Translation workflow that signals stale variants when the source page changes, with optional integration into translation memory tools.
  • Language fallback chains configured per-region so users get the nearest acceptable language rather than English-by-default.
  • Cross-language search via Elasticsearch with per-language analysers; one query returns hits across the languages the user can read.
  • RTL layout support for Arabic, Hebrew, Persian — including bidirectional content within ostensibly LTR pages.
  • hreflang and structured-data plumbing wired to the canonical resolver, not bolted on the template.
  • WCAG 2.1 AA language compliance — lang attribute scoping, voice-of-document markup, screen-reader QA included.

Where this lands

Related work

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