This isn’t a tutorial but rather a public service announcement. If you’re building a website that is going to be viewed in multiple languages, then you should be developing the site in a language other than the native language (in most cases English).
It seems like common sense, but you would be surprised how often different languages and responsive development are not considered at the same time.
Whilst working with an American video streaming platform startup last year the audience was going to be English and Spanish speaking countries. Naturally the designers only bothered to design everything in English, so when it came to building the site a lot of issues were encountered thanks to many single English words being two or more different words in Spanish.
Sometimes the issue of a Spanish word or sentence being longer could be solved by making the overall font size smaller. For some aspects however where space is constrained, it got to the point on a couple of occasions where the designers had to redesign parts of the application to account for different languages (buttons and promotional banner images with text mostly).
Even if you don’t offer native language translation on your site, if a user visits your website and is using Chrome, Google will offer to translate the page into the visitors native language (sometimes automatically if the setting is enabled to do so). This means you can no longer assume that the language you build the site in is the language it is being viewed in (even if you don’t offer the option to change). This can negatively impact the layout of your site or application without you even realising.
What actually prompted me to resume writing this post which has been in a draft format since November 2014 was a submission I saw on the Web Development subreddit. A user who viewed the Windows 10 promotional site in both Italian and English noticed a few responsive aspects were inconsistent and broken because the developers obviously only tested English.
I don’t develop multi language websites that often, but based on previous experience I know that assuming the site will look and function the same way for all languages is a recipe for trouble. I found Spanish to be somewhat troubling especially for buttons, so if you offer that language as an option, develop in Spanish first.
