Web Design guide
How to Build a Multilingual Website for Your Vancouver Business
A website in your customers' own language is one of the warmest welcomes you can give. Here's how to plan one properly, from the first language to Google.
A multilingual website lets customers read about your business in the language they're most comfortable with. Greater Vancouver is one of the most linguistically diverse places anywhere: across Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, Surrey, the Tri-Cities and the Fraser Valley, plenty of your customers may prefer to browse in Mandarin, Cantonese, Punjabi, Persian, Korean, Tagalog or French. Done well, a second language builds real trust. Done badly, it can do the opposite.
Planning your multilingual website
Start by deciding which language to add. Look at who already walks through your door. Ask your front-line staff which languages they hear, and which customers struggle with English when making a decision.
You don't need every language at once. Begin with English plus the one language that matters most to your business, serve that community well, then expand.
Human translation vs machine translation
Machine translation (automatic software) is fast and cheap, but it often misses tone, local phrasing and cultural context. It can sound stiff, or say something you didn't mean.
Human translation, by a fluent speaker who knows how your customers talk, is almost always better for the pages that matter. Visitors notice broken sentences and leave. A practical middle ground: human translation for your homepage, service and contact pages, and machine translation for less important content, always checked by a fluent person before it goes live.
Give each language its own URLs
A common mistake is a plugin that swaps the words on the same page without changing the address. Search engines may then only see one version, so your translated pages are much harder to find.
Instead, give each language its own URLs. A URL is a page's web address; a subdirectory is a folder within your site. For example:
- English: yourbusiness.ca/
- French: yourbusiness.ca/fr/
- Persian: yourbusiness.ca/fa/
This structure lets Google find, understand and show each language version separately.
Make the language switcher obvious
Visitors need an easy way to change language on every page, usually in the top corner of the header, and inside the menu on phones.
- Write each language in its own script: "한국어", not "Korean"; "ਪੰਜਾਬੀ", not "Punjabi"; "فارسی", not "Persian".
- Avoid flags. Flags stand for countries, not languages, and many languages are spoken in many countries.
- Switching language should take people to the same page in the other language, not back to the homepage.
Right-to-left languages like Persian and Arabic
Persian (Farsi) and Arabic are written right to left (RTL). You can't just paste the translation into your English design; the layout needs to flip. Menus, buttons, icons that point a direction, and text alignment all mirror. Numbers, phone numbers and email addresses mixed into RTL text need care so they display in the right order.
Check that your website platform and theme properly support RTL before you start, then test every page on a phone and a computer. Pay special attention to forms, menus and sliders, which are the most likely to break.
Choose fonts that support each script
A script is the set of characters a language is written in. Your English font probably covers French, but not Chinese characters, Korean Hangul, Gurmukhi (Punjabi) or the Persian alphabet. When a font is missing characters, browsers fall back to a system font, which can look out of place.
Pick a quality web font for each script that matches the feel of your brand font, and load only the font each language needs so pages stay fast.
Multilingual SEO basics
SEO (search engine optimization) helps people find you on Google. For each language:
- Translate page titles and descriptions, the text that appears in search results.
- Translate image descriptions (alt text) and use clear file names.
- Add hreflang tags. Hreflang is a small piece of code that tells search engines which language each page is in, and links each page to its translations.
- Write for how people search in that language, rather than translating your English keywords word for word.
Don't forget everything outside your website
Your website isn't the only place people meet you. Mention in your Google Business Profile description that you serve customers in your second language, and welcome reviews in any language. Think about your social media, email newsletters and directory listings too.
Most importantly, plan who will answer. If someone fills in your contact form in Chinese or Persian, someone on your team needs to be ready to reply in that language.
When to get help
A good multilingual site brings together translation, structure, design and code at the same time. If that feels like a lot, Eloge can help. We're a creative and digital team in Coquitlam, BC, and we build websites in any language, including right-to-left layouts, with the SEO set up properly from day one.