How to make a website in your own language

Two decisions get collapsed into one, and it costs people their best sentences. The first is which language you describe your business in. The second is which language the finished website is written in. There is no rule that says they must match, and treating them as one question forces anyone whose strongest language is not their market's language to argue for their own work in their second or third.

Get the order right

• Describe the work in the language you think fastest in. Detail is what makes a site specific, and detail is the first thing lost in translation-as-you-type.
• Choose the site's language from who is reading it, not from who is typing.
• Keep names, place names and protected phrases exactly as you wrote them — those should never be translated, only carried.
• If you serve two markets, pick the primary one for now. A half-finished second language is worse than one confident language.

Casel keeps those as two separate choices for exactly this reason, across eleven site languages: English, German, French, Spanish, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Hindi, Simplified Chinese, Malay and Tamil. The common questions are answered here.

Why translation-first sites read badly

A translated page carries the shape of the language it started in. Idioms survive as strange literal phrases. Headings that were snappy in English become long and flat. Sentence rhythm follows English clause order. Readers rarely diagnose this as translation — they read it as a business that is slightly not from here, which is the opposite of what a local business wants to signal.

Underneath that sit the layers most tools never look at: the stack is English-first well below the training data, your script may quietly cost more tokens to work in, and typesetting is where multilingual pages visibly break.

How to check a page in a script you cannot read

• Look for more than one typeface in a single heading — that is a missing glyph being filled by a fallback font.
• Look at the second and third lines of every paragraph. Line breaking and clipped diacritics show up there, never on the first line.
• Check that buttons and labels still fit their boxes. German and Tamil routinely need more room than English.
• Then send it to one person who reads the language and actually uses the internet in it. One reader beats any checklist, including this one.

Being fluent in the language of your market is not the same as being good at what you do. A website that conflates the two filters for the wrong thing.

If you want the practical sequence rather than the argument, the step-by-step guide is here. If you want the argument, that is the manifesto.