A catalogue in three languages, one source

Clio sells leather goods in French, Dutch and English, and takes back what does not sell. Three languages on one catalogue is not three times the same work: it is one sorting job done once, then three fillings-in.

Three kinds of field, not one

The commonest mistake is treating a product page as a block of text to translate. A product page actually contains three different things.

What gets translated: the commercial name, the description, the materials, the care instructions. Those are words meant for a reader, and they need a translator, not a tool.

What gets localised: the price, the currency, delivery charges, lead times, compulsory legal notices, sizes where they follow national conventions. Those values are not translated, they are recalculated according to the destination.

What never moves: the reference, the barcode, the colour in the sense of the variant, the dimensions. Translating one of those fields breaks the link with stock, and the day it happens, nobody understands why a Dutch order can no longer find its item.

The rule that avoids half the trouble

One source per product, and the languages are views of that source.

The opposite, one page per language, looks simpler at the start and degrades fast. A price changed in two pages out of three, a photograph replaced in French and nowhere else, a variant added in the language of whoever created it. After a year, the three catalogues no longer describe the same shop.

Returns, which reveal everything else

The returns journey is the best test of a multilingual catalogue, because it touches everything: the product page, the order, the carrier, the customer’s language and the rules of the dispatching country.

A Dutch-speaking buyer returning a bag must be able to declare it in their own language, obtain a label valid from their country, and see their refund in the currency they paid in. If one of those three pieces is missing, they write an email, and the economics of the online journey disappear.

That is why we deal with returns at the same time as the product page, and not as an end-of-project option.

What it changes for search

Each language needs its own addresses and its own text, not a switch that replaces the content without changing the URL. A page that changes language at the same address is indexable in only one, which is also what Google’s documentation on localized versions has asked for all along.

Translation work is therefore not only editorial, it is structural, and it is decided when you choose how the languages coexist. Redoing it after indexing costs redirects and time.