Approaches to multilingual websites with Craft CMS

Over the years, we’ve delivered a wide range of multilingual sites, and the one constant is that they all have different implementations.

For this article, I will focus on some of the decisions that need to be made, specific to your business translation strategy, including how we can leverage Craft CMS to tailor your website to your strategy. I’ve then provided some example projects we’ve delivered, each with a different approach.

We’ve written before about how the multi-site functionality of Craft, which I still consider its hidden super power!

Translation and/or localisation

One of the first things to consider is whether you are adding languages to reflect your visitors' language preference (wherever they may be), or because you need to customise your website content for different regions, which may need translating.

Or a little bit of both.

The differences explained:

• Translated site: the content is the same for all languages.
• Localised site: the content is different for the respective country.
• Translated localised site: the content is different and translated. You may also have multiple languages for the local site.

The strategy we decide to pursue will inform everything we do: how we present the site to search engines (SEO), how we configure the content structure in Craft CMS, how content editors update the site, the user experience and so on.

When you localise a site, you are saying that this is the most relevant content to the audience in that region. This is not always about translation, but it’s always a key consideration.

A few reasons you may need to localise include:

• You have offices in different countries offering different services.
• You’re an e-commerce business with different product catalogues in different regions (e.g. you need to compete differently in each market).
• A need to reflect local regulations.
• Compete more effectively for visibility in search results.
• You have a different brand in some countries, requiring different domains!

Whatever the reason, there are a number of ways to optimise and localise your website to meet your specific business needs.

If you simply want to provide the site in multiple languages, the key point is that you are providing the same content in your selected languages.

The joy with Craft is that we can evolve the implementation as the requirements change. For example, a business expands into new regions.

How will you translate your content?

Next up is deciding how you will provide all that content in all those languages!

The approach you take will depend on:

• Availability of colleagues internally to help translate or review translated content.
• Budgets to cover internal resource, or to bring in an external translation agency.
• The importance of your translations accurately reflecting your business tone of voice, technical language, or local culture.
• The speed with which the content needs to be available.

Broadly, you can choose between the following approaches:

A. Manual translation

All the content is translated by humans, whether that be within your business or by a specialist translation freelancer or agency. This approach can produce better quality translations because your team will better understand the business and the audience you’re speaking to.

B. Machine translation

Alternatively, you use an AI to translate your content (e.g. via a translation service that may leverage tools like Google Translate, DeepL, etc.). By automating the translation, you’re able to make all your content available in your chosen languages cost-effectively, efficiently, and quickly.

C. A hybrid of both human and machine translation

Automatic translations are edited and refined by human translators if needed. This approach attempts to balance the best of both worlds: you’re able to edit the translation to more accurately reflect the topic while at the same time training the translation service around your tone of voice - helping it improve future translations. This method can work well for large websites with a larger content team to ensure there is no delay between an article being published and being available in all languages.

D. Let's mix them all!

In this scenario, you have content about your business and services that you prefer to manually translate and a need for a localised site for a region you’re expanding into. But you also have a thought leadership section with a high volume of content published each month that is relevant to all readers.

How will people find your translated pages?

So far, we’ve considered whether you want to translate all the pages for all users or localise the translated content to specific regions. We’ve assessed the practicality of how all the words will be translated. The last thing to review is how people will discover the translated pages.

For this, we need to consider the overall user experience and how people discover your content (paid media, search engine, etc.).

This may include:

• Providing an easy-to-find language switcher. And decide what to include, language, country, flags, etc.
• Geo-targeting to redirect people based on their region.
• A pop-up to ask the visitor to select their preferred language (or region if it’s a localised site).
• Decide to automate or display a message based on the user's browser language preference.

Example Craft CMS language approaches

Once we’ve established the overall strategy, we’re ready to configure Craft CMS. This is an area where the CMS excels, as it allows us to determine at a granular scale what we want the site to do per language or localised site.

Given there are so many different ways to approach this, I’ve taken three websites we’ve delivered to demonstrate different approaches you can take with a Craft CMS powered website.

Direct translation

Neustark are located in Switzerland and has a presence in a number of European countries, including Germany and France. They have made their content available in English, French and German. The site is not localised for the different markets, but this site nicely illustrates how the decision to include a language can be driven by both local official languages as well as the markets they are targeting.

Given the technical nature of their business, they chose to manually translate all the content. This has ensured that the correct emphasis is retained across all the languages. As they have native speakers internally, they have been able to publish new articles with minimal delay in making those pages available in all their chosen languages.

For this scenario, Craft CMS treats the German and French language sites as translations of the primary language set, in this case, as English. This means that as they build a page in English, the selected layouts and relationships to pages and assets are propagated automatically across all the languages. This leaves only the text fields to be updated with the translated text.

A localised and translated website

The LBMA have a presence in China and therefore needed its website to reflect key areas of interest to the region. For them, the localised approach made the most sense and led them to only include relevant pages, which could either be directly translated or adapted from existing content. Given the large size of the global site, this was also the most practical approach.

In Craft, the localised Chinese language site is set up as a separate site, sharing only a few of the relevant content types. Pages created in this site are entirely separate but share templates and assets.

While this is a simple example, the flexibility of Craft means this model can be expanded to include a mix of translated localised sites in addition to translated sites aimed at all regions. This becomes useful when you want to target different countries with custom content while also providing the content in multiple languages. A good example is wanting to ensure French speakers can read your global site in their preferred language, as well as being able to read the local country site, which has different content, in French.

This means you have:

• Global site (English)
• Global site (French)
• Site for France (French)

As far as the user is concerned, these are separate sites.

Third-party translation service with manual edits and AI training

An entirely different approach, which is growing in popularity as the tools improve, is to fully hand over the translation of your site to site to a third party. This is particularly powerful when you have a large volume of content and specialised content editors.

This is the approach taken for Censys. They are a global firm who are starting to provide additional languages for local teams. However, rather than manage these languages directly in the CMS as separate entries, we request that pages be translated by a third-party service before serving the translated page to the website visitor.

In this case, we used WeGlot, a service that is as close to plug and play as you’ll get. They provide a way to translate pages created in Craft without direct integration. A key consideration for this project was ensuring the set-up was secure, given the requirement for a strict content security policy.

With WeGlot, you are able to edit content that has been automatically translated and set up rules for how you want specific words and phrases to be translated. This is especially important for businesses in specialist fields like Censys.

What's next?

If you're trying to work out the best approach for your company when it comes to offering your visitors different languages, then we'd be more than happy to chat through your language puzzle. Get in touch!