Read the original article here
I published the English version and opened it to check.
The header image had a bold Arabic sentence across it. The text underneath was fully English. The page spoke one language; its own image spoke another.
And the image isn’t a detail. It’s the first thing a visitor sees, and it’s what shows up when someone shares your link on LinkedIn or WhatsApp. An English reader sees an image they can’t read, and decides before reading a single line.
So I designed a second image. Not a translation of the first — an independent design carrying the same idea.
Then the link
The article ended with a line: Need a website or store? Get in touch.
The English reader made it to the end, liked what they read, clicked the button — and landed on a page entirely in Arabic.
I lost them at the last step. Not in the content, not in the design. In one link that forgot to ask: who is this visitor, and which language did they arrive in?
What no one sees
Then I found the layer that never shows on screen at all.
Google doesn’t know on its own that two pages are the same article in two languages. Without tags telling it so, it treats them as two pages competing for the same reader — and it picks one, burying the other. You think you doubled your audience. You actually split your own weight in half.
The harder part: meaning doesn’t translate
This is the deepest thing I learned, and the furthest from technical.
I have a line I repeat: the work is mine, the harvest is yours. In Arabic it lands like a proverb. Translated literally into English, it came out correct and lifeless. Accurate, forgettable.
So I rewrote the English version instead of translating it. Translation carries words across. A version carries the effect across.
Why patching costs more than building
I didn’t build from scratch. I bolted an English version onto an existing Arabic site, and it cost me two days.
Had I built the site from day one as a bilingual platform, all of this would have been decisions made once: URL structure, a field per language in the database, an image per audience, links that know which language their visitor arrived in.
Whoever bolts a translate button onto a single-language site pays twice — once for the button, once for fixing what comes after. Whoever builds a bilingual platform from the start pays once.
The takeaway
The visitor never sees any of this. That’s the point — work that succeeds behind the scenes is work nobody notices.
Whoever bolts on a translate button thinks they’re done. Whoever builds a version knows they’ve just started.
Watch the video version →
If you’re thinking about a bilingual site or store — get in touch — the work is mine, the harvest is yours.
