31 January 2026 · 4 min read
Layout must survive expansion
German and Finnish routinely run thirty percent longer than English. Fixed-width buttons and single-line labels break first.
Design with the longest expected string, not the English one.
Formats are cultural, not cosmetic
Date order, decimal separators, currency placement, and address formats vary in ways that cause real errors, not just awkwardness.
Use platform internationalisation APIs rather than hand-rolled formatting.
Right-to-left is a layout change
Arabic and Hebrew mirror the entire layout, including icons that imply direction. This is not a font swap.
Test RTL early. Retrofitting it across a mature interface is expensive.
Where to go from here
If you are weighing localisation for an upcoming project, the useful next step is usually a short scoping conversation rather than a longer article. Bring your constraints — budget, timeline, existing systems, and the team you already have — and the decision usually resolves itself in an hour.
We run these as a fixed-scope discovery session with a written recommendation at the end, including the cases where our advice is that you do not need us.
Working on something like this?
Send us the brief. We will tell you what we would build, what we would cut, and roughly what it costs.
Talk to us