One kitchen, three languages, and a right-to-left problem
A hospitality site published in English, Spanish and Hebrew, where the third language rewrites the layout rather than just the copy.
The problem
Most trilingual sites are bilingual sites with a third language pasted in. That works until one of the languages runs right to left, at which point every assumption baked into the layout — where the navigation starts, which way a carousel advances, which side a price sits on — is wrong rather than merely untranslated.
The Tahini House needed [what the tahini house needed]. Hebrew was not an afterthought in the brief, which is the only reason it was affordable to build.
The approach
We designed the layout in logical properties from the first artboard, so direction was a property of the document rather than a set of exceptions. The practical consequence is that the Hebrew site is not a variant to be maintained; it is the same site, mirrored by the same rules that lay out the other two.
- Content authored per language, not translated in place. A menu is a cultural document; a machine-translated dish name reads as a warning.
- Typography chosen for all three scripts up front, because retrofitting a Hebrew face into a Latin-tuned scale is a redesign, not a substitution.
- Locale in the URL, never in a header. Each language is linkable, and the visitor is never redirected on the basis of where they happen to be standing.
A third language is not a third column in a spreadsheet. Hebrew turned a content problem into a layout problem, and the layout problem is the one worth solving properly.
The outcome
Three complete language versions, live in [n] weeks, with no language shipping in a partial state.
[what changed for the tahini house after launch].