Skip to content
AProduct Engineering← All insights

Internationalization Is More Than Translating the Interface

Humzio's multilingual work showed that localization affects user preferences, organization defaults, screenshots, metadata and product content.

Published
Written by
Xyphors
Reading
1 min
BThe pieceProduct Engineering

# Internationalization Is More Than Translating the Interface

Adding translation files is only the beginning of internationalization.

Humzio supports multiple languages and needed a clear rule for deciding which language a user sees. An organization can provide a default while an individual user can have a preferred locale. When no personal preference exists, the experience can inherit the organization's choice.

Localization reaches beyond labels

Public marketing content, SEO metadata, screenshots, emails, empty states and shared components all contribute to the localized experience.

Even visual details matter. A translated page paired with an English-only screenshot can make the experience feel incomplete.

The lesson

Treat locale as part of product state and design localization into content workflows early. Internationalization becomes much harder when it is added after copy, media and application behavior have already assumed a single language.

DContact06 Clarity · resolved

Want this appliedto your own systems?

Describe the situation and we will tell you where the argument above holds, and where yours is the exception.