Twenty years ago, if a credit union wanted to serve Spanish-speaking members online, the solution was pretty straightforward.
Build a Spanish version of the website.
We did it ourselves.
Then technology changed.
Translation software became remarkably good. Browsers began offering built-in translation. Today, a visitor can arrive at an English-language website and, with a click, see much of it in another language.
And now AI can translate and generate content across languages almost instantly.
So what does it mean to actually support another language on a website?
That's where things get interesting.
Because translating a website and speaking someone's language aren't necessarily the same thing.
A translation changes the words.
A multilingual experience considers the person.
Think about a credit union website.
A translated page might correctly convert the words for an auto loan, checking account or membership. But what happens when that member searches for something? Do they get useful results in their language?
What about a calculator?
A form?
A PDF?
A disclosure?
A chatbot?
A navigation label?
An error message?
And perhaps most importantly, does the content actually make sense in the context of how that person thinks about their financial needs?
Languages aren't interchangeable dictionaries.
A phrase that sounds perfectly natural in English may feel awkward when translated literally. Financial terminology can vary. The way people ask questions can vary. Even the way people navigate and look for information can vary.
That's the difference between translating content and creating an experience.
One website. Many ways to use it.
This is where we think the future gets particularly interesting.
Maybe every organization won't need to maintain a completely separate version of its website for every language.
Maybe they will.
Sometimes, a dedicated Spanish experience is absolutely the right answer. If a significant portion of your audience prefers Spanish, there can be tremendous value in intentionally designing and maintaining that experience.
But technology gives us another possibility.
A visitor could arrive at your website and simply communicate in the language they're most comfortable using.
They could search in Spanish.
Ask a question in Spanish.
Get an answer in Spanish.
Find the information they need without having to first figure out how your website handles languages.
That's a very different idea from translating a website.
The goal isn't necessarily to create another copy of the English site.
The goal is to make the information accessible to the person who needs it. And that distinction matters. Because a website isn't really multilingual just because someone can translate its pages. It's multilingual when people can use it in their language.
The technology for doing that is getting better very quickly.
We don't know exactly where it will lead. Maybe dedicated language versions will remain the standard for organizations with significant multilingual audiences. Maybe increasingly capable browsers, search tools and AI experiences will make a single website much more practical.
Probably, we'll see some combination of both.
What we do know is that the problem has changed.
Twenty years ago, the question was:
"How do we build another website in Spanish?"
Today, we can ask a much more interesting question:
"How do we make our website genuinely useful to someone who speaks Spanish?"
Those aren't the same question.
And we think the second one is the one worth answering.