“We need the site in German and Turkish as well.” The sentence sounds like a translation task. It is an architecture task, and organizations that treat it as translation end up with the most expensive kind of website: three that look the same and behave differently. Working across Istanbul, Frankfurt and the UK, we see the pattern often enough to be direct about it — structure comes first, and translation is the last step, not the first.
The idea
A multilingual, multi-market website is a set of decisions that must be made before a single word is translated.
Language or market? German for Germany, Austria and Switzerland is one language and three markets, with different legal entities, prices and contacts. English may serve the UK, a global audience and a default. Decide whether your structure is organized by language, by market, or by both — and which one owns pricing, contacts and legal.
What is shared and what is local. Product specifications are usually global; certifications, case studies, events and contacts are usually local. A content model that marks each field as global or local is what lets a German editor change a local phone number without touching the English product description.
URL and signals. One domain with language directories — /de/, /tr/, English at the root — consolidates authority and keeps hreflang manageable. Separate country domains split authority three ways and triple the maintenance; they earn that cost only for organizations with genuinely separate businesses per country.
Translated everything. Slugs, navigation, metadata, image alt text, forms, error messages, structured data, sitemaps. A site where the body copy is German and the URL, title and schema are English is half-translated to a search engine and to an AI assistant.
Editorial governance. Who approves German? Who is notified when the English source changes? Which pages are translated fully, which are summarized, which stay English? Without answers, translations drift out of date within a quarter.
Why it matters
Retrofitting multilingual structure is one of the costliest changes a website can go through, because it touches the content model, the URLs, the templates, the integrations and the editorial process at once. Designing for it from the start costs little. The difference is the gap between a site that launches its fourth market in weeks and one that needs a project.
It matters for visibility, too. Search engines and AI systems serve answers by language and region. A German buyer asking a German question is answered from German pages that are clearly marked as German and clearly connected to their English equivalents. Missing or inconsistent hreflang, mixed-language pages and untranslated metadata are the most common reasons a strong company is invisible in a market it actually serves.
In practice
A global automotive supplier had grown market by market: a German site built by one agency, an English site by another, a Turkish one by a third. Same company, three information architectures, three navigations, and product data maintained by hand in each. Launching a fourth market was quoted as a new website.
We rebuilt it as one platform: a single content model with global and local fields, one design system, language directories on one domain, complete hreflang, and a translation workflow in which the source language change triggers review in the others. Product data now comes from the PIM once and appears in every market. The fourth and fifth markets launched as configuration and content, not as projects.
What to do
Before you commission translation, write the market matrix: languages down the side, markets across the top, and in each cell what is local — contacts, legal, pricing, case studies. Mark every content type as global or local. Decide the URL structure and who owns each language editorially. Then choose a platform and a multilingual approach that fits that matrix, and only then translate — professionally, including everything a search engine reads.
This is what our Multilingual CMS work covers, from architecture through to launch in each market.
FAQ
Should we redirect visitors by their location?
No. Suggest, don’t force. Automatic redirection by IP hides other language versions from search engines and frustrates travellers and expatriates. Detect the preference, offer the switch, and remember the choice.
Is machine translation acceptable for enterprise websites?
As a first draft for internal review, sometimes. As published content, rarely. Buyers, regulators and AI systems all detect the difference, and the reputational cost lands on the organization, not on the translation tool.
WPML, Polylang or something else?
The right tool follows the structure. On WordPress, a well-configured WPML or Polylang setup handles language directories, translated slugs, hreflang and metadata. On Umbraco, language variants are native. What matters is that the tool is configured to the market matrix, not the other way round.
Expanding into new markets? Let’s design the structure first.