Building multilingual sites that don't suck

The 3 architectures

• Subfolder: example.com/de/ — best for SEO, our default
• Subdomain: de.example.com — fine for separate teams
• ccTLD: example.de — best for full localization, expensive

Hreflang in 30 seconds

Every page in language A should reference its equivalent in language B with rel='alternate' hreflang. Self-reference too. Use x-default for the default. Mistakes here cause Google to serve the wrong language to the wrong region — silently.

Why pure machine translation kills you

Google Translate gets 90% accuracy, which sounds great until you realize it gets brand voice, tone, and cultural references at 0%. Use AI for the first draft, human for the polish, native speaker for sign-off. Always.