Website Internationalisation: Designing and Building for Global Audiences

Internationalisation: Designing for Languages You Don't Speak

Building a website for a single language is straightforward. Building one that can serve users in French, Arabic, Japanese, and English simultaneously requires deliberate planning from the earliest design decisions. Design Agency builds multilingual websites for clients operating across European and international markets.

i18n vs. l10n

Internationalisation (i18n): The process of building a product that CAN be adapted for different languages and regions — without requiring engineering changes for each new language.

Localisation (l10n): The process of actually adapting the product for a specific language or region — translating content, adapting imagery, adjusting date formats, currency, and cultural references.

Design Considerations for i18n

Text expansion: Text translated from English often expands significantly:

• German text is typically 30–40% longer than English
• Design layouts that can accommodate text expansion without breaking

RTL languages: Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, and Urdu are written right-to-left. The entire layout must mirror:

• Navigation sits on the right
• Text is right-aligned
• Icons with directional meaning must be flipped
• Padding and margin must swap

Typography: Different scripts require different typefaces. Latin characters and Chinese characters cannot use the same font. Ensure your font system includes web font support for all target languages.

Date, time, and number formats:

• Date: DD/MM/YYYY (Europe), MM/DD/YYYY (US), YYYY-MM-DD (ISO)
• Numbers: 1,000.00 (Anglo-American) vs. 1.000,00 (Continental European)
• Currency: Position of symbol varies by locale

Technical Implementation

• Use the lang attribute on the html element
• Implement hreflang tags for multilingual SEO
• Use i18n libraries (i18next for React, vue-i18n for Vue)
• Consider URL structure: subdomain (fr.example.com), subdirectory (/fr/), or separate domain

Optumio maintains multilingual WordPress sites with WPML and Polylang — plugin management, performance monitoring, and security across all language versions.